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RELIGION AND THE 
MODERN MIND 

AND OTHER ESSAYS 
EST MODERNISM 

BY 
FRANK CARLETON DOAN 




BOSTON 

SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 

1909 



Copyright 1909 
Shebhan, French &^ Company 



•^ CI. Ac 51 ir>.^ 



TO 

MY FATHER 

mCKSITE QUAKER 



CONTENTS 

PAGS 

PREFACE ........ iii 

I. RELIGION AND THE MODERN 

MIND 1 

II. GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME . 53 

IIL LIFE EVERLASTING: ITS CON- 
DITION 83 

IV. PRAYER AND THE MODERN 

MIND 117 

V. THE UNKNOWN GOD . . . .143 

VI. THE INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF 

GOD 153 

VII. THE PRESENT GOD . . . .162 

APPENDIX A 173 

APPENDIX B 187 



PREFACE 

I 

My good cousin asked me the other day: 
** For whom is your forthcoming book being 
written?" I was obliged to make answer: 
" That must remain to be seen. We'll have to 
wait until the book has come forth in fact." 
Still, as it is being thrown upon the public there 
is no harm in my declaring by way of preface 
the good intention of the book. What I intend 
is to influence you who read me understandingly 
to clearer and sincerer thinking upon matters 
which do vastly concern every sober man — mat- 
ters of free religion and a modern spirit. As I 
have laboriously read the proof-sheets of this, my 
first-bom book, I have remarked many an imper- 
fection which, alas, it was all too late to correct. 
I do not ask the critical reader to condone these: 
they are, I know, inexcusable by any test you 
may apply. What I do ask is that you along 
with me should sincerely experiment with the ex- 
perience of God herein recorded. For, let me 
assure you, it is an experience. If at any point 
I have seemed to write for the mere pleasure of 
the thing, or if for the moment I have seemed 
to expend my energies in worming out of my 
inner consciousness a Weltanschauung amazing to 
the reason merely and not tolerable in terms of 
life; then and there I beg you to read lightly. 

iii 



iv PREFACE 

But if in places you find me writing unaffectedly 
and sincerely of matters that do concern me, and 
may you, most deeply, then I conjure you to read 
profoundly there; to experiment largely in the 
Life you glimpse there. 

The essays sewed together in this little volume 
were delivered on very various occasions. One of 
them was occasioned by a visitation of certain 
colleges and universities I was authorized to make 
as Billings Lecturer for the American Unitarian 
Association. One or two others were used in the 
first instance as chapel talks before our students 
in the theological school, and afterwards printed 
here and there. The essay on prayer was given 
in substance as a vesper address before two or 
three colleges and universities here in the West. 
The gist of another was used in such places as 
the University of Wisconsin and Ohio State Uni- 
verity, where I have had occasional engagements. 
The essay on Life Everlasting was originally de- 
livered as the Channing Hall address in Boston. 
And so on. It doesn't matter much what the 
precise history of these following papers has 
been. As they now stand they are much revised ; 
and, I dare say, anyway, they have been mostly 
forgotten by those who may have heard or read 
them in their original form. 

Mostly, but not wholly, I may be permitted 
to say. For I have in my letter-file a collection 
of notes from friends, some known and others 
unknown, who tell me that these thoughts con- 



PREFACE V 

ceming the larger Freedom and the larger Life 
have in marked measure brought them freedom 
and life. The letters are mostly from men, — 
indeed with two exceptions, come in all cases 
from men. I confess I find this in itself an en- 
couragement to try my hand at addressing a 
larger circle of these men by printing a book. 
Women have their religion as a matter of course : 
very tender, sensitive, unspeakable withal, but of 
course. I have in all my life encountered only 
one woman-atheist ; — or is it as many as two? 
God, it would seem, is congenital with his femi- 
nine offspring ; I cannot hope that my essays will 
do more than perhaps deepen and intensify a 
humanism in religion which is already theirs by 
a sort of divine right. 

But perhaps the experience of God-Man — if 
the name sounds awkward in your ears then 
choose some other; for the name doesn't in the 
least matter the experience I am seeking to set 
forth — the experience of Man-God I aim to ex- 
press here may astonish some men into trying 
the same experiment in divinity. The point is, 
to strip your manhood most scrupulously, most 
painfully bare of all its filthy parts, to lay aside 
your bestialities and liberate your manhoods, to 
expose the naked, cold-as-steel soul of you to the 
eternal tempering energy of the world's fire-dust ; 
then by reacting to transpierce the universe's self 
with this pure and strong manhood you bear, and 
call the resulting experience God, God-Man, 



vi PREFACE 

Man-God, or by what name soever God may will. 
That experience is your religion's sole deep con- 
cern. That experience is you ; it is God. 

Perhaps this will appeal, I say, to men of iron 
constitution. God grant this, 

n 

How often does one encounter in the history 
of the human spirit the contemptible argument 
against this or that vision of the world and God: 
it is the vision of youth. There are those, doubt 
it not, my younger brethren! who will condemn 
your humanist experience of God on precisely 
such ground: it is the philosophy of youth, en- 
thusiastic, breathless, whimsical, shallow. But, 
mind you, a man's God, whether he be a young 
enthusiast or an old partisan of his God, does 
most tantalizingly equal his age, does most pre- 
cisely and scrupulously fit his own annual nature. 
If then the God of younger men generally is 
youthful, buoyant, adolescent; then by the same 
token your God, my very dear old friends, is pro- 
portionally aged, level-headed, palsied, senile. It 
is just a matter of temperament, or of age, so far 
as I can see. Certainly there is no point in 
argwing the case. 

Now, it seems to me, jesting and back-biting 
aside, that we may as well face a vital dilemma, — 
a vital, inner disparity of human temperaments 
which must be felt, I'm sure, by every man who 
moves with any sort of conscious and serious pur- 



PREFACE vii 

pose among his fellows. I mean that immemorial 
and ineradicable conflict between men who are 
radically enthusiastic or conservatively partisan 
in all the deep concerns of this life. This aliena- 
tion of men of the one temperament from men of 
the other is after all not much a matter of years, 
I think. There is no measuring of youthfulness 
or agedness in such terms. It is rather a matter 
of temperament, of the degree of freshness in a 
man's soul of whatever age. On the one hand 
you may find frank, fresh spontaneity, openness 
to conviction, an insatiable and voracious appe- 
tite for living being kept up at any cost through 
all a man's no matter how many years of life. 
This freshness, as I have remarked again and 
again in moving among men, is dead against, or 
rather most livelily against, that sober, balanced, 
withered steadiness observable on the other hand in 
most successful business men and in all religious 
bigots. Perpetual youth against congenital aged- 
ness — there's where the conflict of man with man 
is severest and most irrepressible. It is in a 
very deep sense a conflict of god with god ! For 
your God, as I have said, accords with and fights 
on the side of your temperamental age. 

Not that one of the perpetually youthful tem- 
per would fail to profit by the passing years. 
For one I hope to change notably in the quarter 
century ahead of me, the period of service vouch- 
safed me before I attain that venerable, scholas- 
tic majority when philosophy teachers are apt to 



viii PREFACE 

be " retired " — as the delightfully frank phrase 
has it. As Stevenson says somewhere : " To 
hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty 
is to have been stupefied for a score of years." I 
hope, God furthering me ! to view with profound 
dissatisfaction this first-born book of my soul ere 
I begin to attain my " majority," my age of 
retirement. Indeed, I even now, before ever the 
page-proofs have reached the bindery, remark a 
plenty of blemishes I would gladly remove from 
my book's more uncomely parts. But to make 
such changes in the interest of a clearer and per- 
haps solemner expression of the deep thing you 
seek to communicate, to deepen one's life and 
broaden one's views of it all, to venture beyond 
the shallows of youth into the deeps of a larger, 
fuller Life, ever to enlarge one's craft is one 
thing; to change one's course altogether is quite 
another. As to altering my present straight 
course and careening quite elsewhere on life's 
way ; as to believing at, say, sixty or so, what is 
now to my mind only so much stuff and nonsense, 
so much monstrous blasphemy of him I here call 
God — I could not endure that without losing 
my humanity, without breaking my heart, with- 
out debasing and destroying the very soul of me. 
As for me then, being as I am, I must follow 
my own course. In youth or old age, in life or 
in death, in body or in spirit, I give and dedicate 
my true self, in all sincerity and simplicity, to 
him I call God-Man — a very God of everlast- 



PREFACE ix 

ing youth and perpetually buoyant Life. Being 
so, you see that if I ever do outgrow the experi- 
ence of God herein made public I am indeed a lost 
soul; all the sweet juices of my human being will 
have been bruised out of me upon the altar stone 
of the world's crushing Reality. In such a state 
of flat and withered deadness of soul I think I 
can see the somnolent, conservative, aged world- 
ground yawning to receive my defeated and 
juiceless spirit. God forbid that! 

" Sunnyside," Meadville, Pennsylvania. 
September, 1909. 



I 

RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 



What is the place of religion in modem life? 
Within the last quarter century this problem has 
been raised so frequently and from such trifling 
points of view that its familiarity, I fear, has 
bred a certain contempt in the mind of the thor- 
oughly modem man. In his way of thinking 
these various attempts to establish once more a 
vital connection between the church and human 
life are all, each in its own way, beside the point. 
They are too secular; or too apologetic; or too 
defensive; or, if you please, too practical. The 
thing needed is a revival of those eternal verities 
in which all men of whatever culture have always 
instinctively believed. What men want is the re- 
establishment of the church as a distributer of the 
bread of life, of the pulpit as a place of moral 
and prophetic vision. Of course the practical 
man doesn't put his case just this way. But put 
it for him frankly, unaffectedly, above all undog- 
matically, and he will bow his assent. 

Some months ago certain telling editorials ap- 
peared in the Wall Street Journal, a periodical 
hardly to be accused of sentimentality in its inner 
springs. These editorials called for a reviving of 
the impulses of rehgion in our own modern life. 

1 



2 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

I was struck by the absence of cant, the positive 
ring of sincerity in the tone of these editorial ap- 
peals. I was myself about to go on a pilgrimage 
to several of the colleges and universities of the 
great Northwest. As official lecturer for one of 
the great religious denominations of the country 
my object was to commend the ministry to these 
young men as a manly and commanding pro- 
fession. I asked Mr. Pratt what I should say to 
these college and university men. He replied that 
since religion is the prof oundest instinct, the deep- 
est concern of human being, to be its sponser be- 
fore men is indisputably a man's most sacred 
calling. But the trouble, he said, with the mod- 
em minister is that " he preaches the truth as if 
it were fiction ! " 

Now instead of a simple and passionate em- 
phasis of eternal truth the modern minister is 
urged by reUgion's ill-advised promoters to adopt 
all sorts of practical, not to say sensational de- 
vices for reclaiming the modern man. Not long 
ago several of our leading magazines opened their 
columns to suggestions of ways whereby the 
church might be made once more a vital power in 
the lives of men. The prescriptions were many 
and radical. The church, for one thing, should 
abandon mediaeval cathedral architecture and 
should rather imitate the style of the great, down- 
town business blocks: men would feel more at 
home in such surroundings, we were told. The 
church, for another thing, should become " in- 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 3 

stitutional," aiming to serve the whole man from 
his head to his feet : " You can't convert a man 
on an empty stomach," they said ; " nor can you 
compete with the theaters and such places unless 
in your church you duplicate in some fashion their 
more popular attractions." As another measure 
of self-preservation the church was urged to elab- 
orate some scheme of Christian Socialism where- 
with to compromise on the one hand the Chris- 
tian with the socialist and on the other hand the 
socialist with the Christian. 

It was about this time that one of our fore- 
most American psychologists of religion was 
heard to say in private that, if the church would 
keep within its portals the independent, thinking 
men of to-day, the preacher must allow these men 
to " talk back." The day of priestly hocus- 
pocus, when the church might exercise an exter- 
nal authority over the lives of men, has of course 
gone by. On that we are agreed. My friend, 
the psychologist, swaying to an opposite extreme, 
holds that the prophetic and apostolic office of 
the preacher is itself lost forever! It only re- 
mains for the church to become a sort of club- 
house, a conference hall; the minister unfrocked, 
his exalted function lowered, would, I suppose, 
serve as a sort of honorary president of this pres- 
ent century club organized for the exchange of 
opinion upon the deep and eternal concerns of 
life! 

The gist of all these inexpert opinions as to 



4 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

the tonic best suited to revive moribund churches 
is after all contained in the recommendation, so 
often repeated in these days, that the preacher 
should give his people " practical " sermons. It 
doesn't much matter, he is told by his worldly 
counselors, what the theological creed of his church 
may be : men won't understand that very well any- 
way. It were better to dispose of it quietly at 
some point early in the service, then proceed — 
to preach truth as if it were fiction ! 

These remedies, I say, are too external and 
fumbling; in a word, too practical. They are 
not heroic and tonic enough. They do not feed 
men's spirit with the sincere milk of truth. 

One is bound to acknowledge in passing that 
the " religious " papers have had little to do with 
these more external specifics for the restoration 
of religion to a place of influence in modern life. 
On the whole they have endeavored to rehabilitate 
the church in more vital directions. But, here 
again, there is palliation and want of clearness 
and heroism in the view taken of the church's 
relation to modern life. Too much of the nervous 
discussion which in recent years has filled the 
columns of the religious weeklies has been merely 
apologetic, guarded and abjectly defensive. 
Earnest appeals are incessantly made to the su* 
preme and indisputable place of religion in the 
civilization of the past. " Surely," we are told, 
*' men cannot yet afford to dispense with the great 
instruments of fear and faith by which religion 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 6 

through the ages has controlled and developed 
human civilization ! " But why will these zealous 
defenders of the faith persist in confusing re- 
ligion with an institution called the " Church," 
or for that matter, religion with that particular 
denominational theory which they happen to pro- 
fess ? To confuse the eternal impulses of religion 
— fear, faith, love and the like — with an institu- 
tion of whatever sort or age is in itself narrow- 
ing, misleading and mischievous. 

And then the church as an institution has not 
been an invariable instrument of civilization, as 
every historian well knows. In some instances it 
has dammed the springs of human life to the 
point of inundation : its institutional interests have 
clogged and obstructed those very impulses of 
fear and faith and love upon whose spontaneous 
and free action the religious life itself depends. 

Least of all can it be claimed that the church 
by conserving religious dogmas — and this sounds 
curiously like the claim often made these days in 
defense of the " faith of the fathers " — has been 
the faithful promoter of human rights and pro- 
gress. In this matter of dogma it has been in- 
variably her arch-enemies, science and philos- 
ophy, who have usurped the church's instru- 
mentalities of civilization and enlightenment. No 
doubt the church has always been the great con- 
server; but so often, alas, it has conserved the 
wrong thing! — the shell instead of the kernel, 
the dogma instead of the living impulse of which 



6 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

the dogma is but the ill-fitting investment. In 
all this I would be understood: these defenders of 
the church intend sincerely enough to revive and 
reestablish the eternal things for which as an in- 
stitution the church ideally stands. But always 
their argument is overshadowed by the spectre 
of the church as an institution of dogmas long 
since cast out by men of the modern mind. At- 
tempts to revive the church in this or that historic 
form of doctrine are too plainly confuted by the 
solemn fact that, as an institution of dogma, — 
and that is what the Christian Church, as historic^ 
is, — the church is dead. 

n 

It is a mistake in any case to lump all modem 
men and then attempt to establish some single 
relation between them and the religious life. In 
the following pages the discussion aims not at 
men in general, but rather at a certain type of 
man, the man with what I have presumed to call 
the " modern mind." 

For in my intercourse with men I seem to re- 
mark among them several types of mind. These 
temperaments of course intercross constantly: no 
man stands in any perfectly single relation to 
the church. But on the whole his attitude may 
be marked as facing predominantly/ one way or 
another in religious matters. Among these sev- 
eral temperaments I have been especially im- 
pressed with three types of mind. Let me mark 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 7 
these as " indifFerent," " confused " and " mod- 



em." 



As " indifferent " I describe the man who has 
simply dropped the services of religion out of 
his life. He is commonly regarded as the lead- 
ing type of mind in the modern world of affairs. 
All his energies seem to have become commer- 
cialized. He is a practical and, worst of all, an 
unconscious materialist. His materialism, unlike 
that of a former period of human history, has 
no conscious principle in it. It isn't as if he had 
deliberately rejected idealistic impulses as unreal 
and unsubstantial. By long process of habitua- 
tion the commonplace exercises of his daily rounds 
of affairs have simply displaced the more ideal 
and poetic passions of life. He has lost the art 
of aspiring, of poetizing, of enthusing over 
things unseen and inestimable. In all these re- 
gions of finer impalpable culture he is a stranger, 
awkward, nonplussed and indifferent. 

It is commonly alleged that these indifferents 
are in the majority in modem life. Certainly 
their case is most grievous; they are of all men 
most miserable. But their tribe, as I believe, is 
very rare indeed. Many men by their habitual 
silence and by their regular avoidance of religious 
services appear to belong to this tribe of indif- 
ferents. But in fact these men of affairs are in 
countless instances concealing minds that are long- 
ing for the Eternal. Anyone who feels with 
sympathetic touch the pulse of our modem life 



8 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

will find that life not dull and sluggish at all but 
deeply alive to the things of the spirit, wearied 
of the worid's practical materialism, sick of all 
its sad infidelity. The simple fact is now, as it 
has ever been in periods of desolating materialism, 
that men on all sides are minded to revolt toward 
simpler and diviner ways of living their days. I 
have learned in passing among men that the eter- 
nal verities are being sought in the most unlikely 
places and by the most unlikely representatives 
of our modern life. It is profoundly significant 
that men of practical mind and of worldly re- 
sources are quietly joining the ranks of life's 
idealists, and are wanting somehow to replace the 
church in its former position of jurisdiction over 
the lives of men. 

Men's silence then, as they will tell you in 
hours of unwonted confidence, is owing to no 
indifference of mind in matters religious but 
solely to their sense of unfitness to discuss the 
idealistic impulses fermenting in their lives. They 
are indifferent, I imagine, to the church's ofttimes 
sensational or apologetic handling of ideals which 
in them lie too deep for utterance. In these mat- 
ters the average layman is often vastly deeper 
and more serious, alas, than the minister of re- 
ligion itself. The " indifference of the laity," I 
must believe, is due in large measure to a simple 
weariness on the part of serious men with the 
preacher's timid, or silly, practical tampering with 
religion's sacred ofiices. It is pertinent that 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 9 

where there has been honest preaching, simple and 
abandoned, with nothing concealed or withheld 
between preacher and people ; where there has been 
no timidity nor sensational clap-trap, but a free, 
unafraid and unashamed giving of his whole, 
honest and solemn person in the preacher's weekly 
meditation before his people ; where there has been 
no apology nor nervous self-defense but simple 
and straight-forward reflection upon the eternal 
instincts and passions of life — in these circum- 
stances the layman has always listened gladly. 
For through the preacher's common words he has 
felt his own silences somehow become vocal with 
the soul's natural and eternal harmonies. Brooks, 
Beecher, Hale, Gladden, Savage — such giants of 
God have lived and still do live but never con- 
front an indifferent laity. 

The instant success of great, yet simple preach- 
ing is evidence against the claim that the indif- 
ferents, the unconscious materialists, dominate our 
modem life. The average layman is spiritually 
modest ; he does not easily expose the secret places 
of his inner life. He is spiritually sensitive; he 
will not subject the really deep problems of his 
life to the buffoonery and tomfoolery too often 
exhibited in the modem pulpit. None the less 
he is desperately in earnest. Great crowds of hia 
kind are awaiting a voice of prophecy in our 
modem world — a prophet who shall command 
that the gates of the church be lifted up, that 
the portals of the larger Life be thrown open to 



10 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

admit without condition or apology all those who 
are now suffering for its atmosphere of freedom 
and peace and joy. 

We need not expect that in the long run this 
larger and deeper need of the modem mind will 
be satisfied with the discussion of social and ethical 
problems now in vogue among many popular 
preachers. After all the average layman is bet- 
ter able than the average minister to deal with 
these more practical problems of life. In an 
hour's reading of some authoritative book or 
magazine the layman with his background of 
worldly knowledge will inform himself more gen- 
uinely upon questions of social and practical 
morality than by listening to an inexpert, morn- 
ing sermon dealing with such matters. A meager 
week or two of reading and reflection upon the 
part of the preacher and his sermon is ready! 
But the inexperience and practical awkwardness 
of it all shriek at you from every page and 
paragraph of his labored discourse. With the 
rare exception of men in the pulpit whose pre- 
vious experience of life especially entitles them 
to speak upon " problems of the day '' the min- 
ister is gTotesquely ineffectual when dealing with 
such questions. All his habits of life and 
thought, all his instincts, if he be indeed an ifir- 
stinctive prophet of the larger Life, unfit him to 
grasp directly the " affairs " of his laymen. They 
respect him for attempting these matters ; — any- 
thing were better than the traditional and tire- 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 11 

some " doctrinal " sermon ! But they like him 
best of all when he is discharging his peculiarly 
ministerial office: saturating their souls with an 
atmosphere of mystic Manhood such that their 
practical solutions of the problems of the day 
will be in fact ideal. This is something mystic 
and intangible, I grant. But it is the great and 
lasting thing in all apostolic and prophetic 
preaching. Anything short of this, anything 
more practical than this, however excellent and 
useful it may be in its way, is not in the province 
of the preacher. To know practically and in de- 
tail the conditions and problems in the life of 
the layman is hardly the preachers business. He 
cannot hope to " win men " by becoming himself 
a layman. Not by awkward dealing with prac- 
tical problems remote from his proper instincts 
and temperament, but by somehow touching each 
week, simply and solemnly, the things the layman 
himself in all his spiritual silence, modesty and 
sensitiveness is thinking on will the minister of 
a larger Life serve the modem man in his deeper 
nature. 

m 
Meanwhile, there are many quiet, unobtrusive 
ministers over the country who cannot be fairly 
accused of thus secularizing their pulpits; — a 
large body of faithful men who, unknown to 
fame, are yet leading their people along the simple 
paths of righteousness they and their fathers have 
trodden. To me there is a certain pathos in the 



12 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

transparent consecration of these men. They 
man the pulpits of their fathers and defend their 
fathers' faith. By the great test of practice that 
faith has worked well in their cases. It has 
made them gentler, honester, more generous in 
their life with their fellows; it has kept their 
faces toward the Eternal. They make no skilful 
apologetic and learned defence of these ancestral 
traditions. Their argument has in it the deeper 
ring of a mystic conviction. They are simple, 
sincere, untutored, unspoiled. They are in the 
direct line of apostolic succession. Their Chris- 
tian culture belongs by right to those apostolic 
and early patristic periods before the Christian 
experience had been spoiled by " Christian Evi- 
dences " and " Sacred Oratory." 

By right; but the trouble is that there lurks 
in the minds of these admirably sincere defenders 
of the fathers' faith a half -suspected confusion; 
a confusion of their natural, unspoiled impulses 
of religion with certain of the outgrown dogmas 
and symbols in which these great human passions 
once clothed themselves. They retain the prime 
passions of religion: a sense of the eternal, the 
joys of divine companionship, the complete sub- 
jection of their human life to an eternal law of 
righteousness; but they confusedly express these 
deep experiences in terms no longer fitting the 
present depth and freedom of such great com- 
munions between the human and the larger Life. 

This confusion of mind among modern church- 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 13 

goers IS very widespread. The thing which attracts 
and holds them in regular attendance upon services 
of the church is clearly not the doctrines therein 
set forth; it must be rather the transparent and 
refreshing sincerity of the preacher himself upon 
whose honor they are glad to stake their own 
eternal lives. He preaches fiction as if it were 
truth ! for to him it is truth, sacred and everlast- 
ing. To him and his people your difficulties with 
this or that dogmatic conception are shallow and 
impertinent. The deep and pertinent thing, they 
say, is that the dogmas do work, do fit the life 
of the world, do sweeten the atmosphere of the 
home! Even so, these men believe deep of God, 
eternity, human destiny and the like — things 
world-wide and race-wide in their value ; but they 
confuse these eternal things in religion with the 
transient dogmas and symbolic practices of their 
historic sect. 

The inevitable result of this endeavor to save 
and honor outworn dogmas under the shadow of 
religion's eternal truths is a narrowing and shal- 
lowing of those eternal values themselves. 
Thus men of this group I call " confused " be- 
lieve very practically and deeply in God but only 
in him as revealed in the Christ. They believe 
in eternity but only as a region wherein lies the 
Kingdom of God planned and prepared by his 
risen Son. They believe in universal salvation 
but only because every man must eventually adopt 
the " plan " which their peculiar priest or 



14 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

preacher sets forth as " scriptural." They hold 
that God's revelation of himself is free and uni- 
versal but the culmination and final form of that 
revelation is after all contained within the Chris- 
tian bible as interpreted by the scholars of their 
persuasion. And so on in an apparently hope- 
less and endless confusion of the visible dogmas 
of human history with the invisible realities of 
the larger Life. 

This confusion of mind and, if I may express 
a kindly, though frank judgment, this spiritual 
superficiality is the most conspicuous phenomenon 
in modem Christian circles. It is all so sincere, 
in spots so mightily stimulating and helpful! 
Strong men deliberately pay the price of intel- 
lectual confusion for the precious freight of prac- 
tical goods conveyed to them within the old wrap- 
pings of a former faith. But it is all so super- 
ficial and misleading! Listen to a few sermons 
or read a few of the books of the more notable 
of these sincere apologists of primitive Chris- 
tianity, these leaders of Christian peoples " back 
to Christ " ! If your mind be alert in such mat- 
ters you will easily mark the very paragraph and 
in some instances the very sentence in which the 
speaker or writer's thought unconsciously turns 
the comer from the essential to the unessential, 
from the spontaneous to the dogmatic, from the 
inner life to its external forms, from the eternal 
to the transient things of religion. It all aims 
at the unspoiled experience of apostolic and early 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 15 

patristic Christianity ; it would delve beneath the 
debris of dogma in order to reclaim Christianity 
in its primitive and eternal forms. 

In the hands of the leading exponents of this 
primitive, pragmatic Christianity, in men trained 
in the school of the incomparable Ritschl, the mix- 
ing of essential with unessential elements is in a 
high degree expert. They are far subtler than 
the more naive preachers of the fathers' faith. 
But the confusion in their cases is nevertheless 
very real and to my mind very grievous. They 
commend to men an interpretation of Christian 
culture in the very highest degree plausible and 
tempting but which clear-thinking men, it may 
be of the next generation, will be apt to reject as 
too unscientific and unmystic for their own needs. 

For, notwithstanding denials to the contrary, 
men must see sooner or later that this appeal to 
primitive Christianity as a practically final form 
of religious experience does imply that the aposto- 
lic and early patristic Christians were peculiar^ 
not to say inspired, in the inner springs of their 
religious being. This is of course most vigor- 
ously denied by those who defend the Christian 
religion as " final". They tell us very clearly 
indeed that by the " final elements " in Christian 
experience they do not mean anything peculiar 
to Paul or his time nor to the early fathers and 
their times ; that they aim rather to revive in men's 
minds the eternal values in the religion called 
Christian. In defending their view of the Chris- 



16 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

tian religion against this charge of historic lim- 
itation they have even gone to the extreme of de- 
claring that if Jesus of Nazareth, the source of 
historic Christianity, had never Kved, the things 
they afBrm as final in Christianity would still be 
binding upon men ! 

But at this juncture the clear-minded man al- 
ways rises to a point of enquiry; nor can he be 
silenced by the decision that his questions are 
mere " quibbles '\ He asks, for example, in what 
conceivable sense this " pragmatic " Christianity 
is a revival of primitive Christianity, " Really 
now," he says, " if you emasculate historic Chris- 
tianity, depleting it not merely of its later dogmas 
— every one in these days seems glad to let them 
go ! — but also of all its recorded maxims of 
conduct and even of its very founder, is this not 
tantamount to saying that these eternal values are 
not in any sense whatsoever Christian? Are not 
these values genuinely eternal? Are they not the 
birth-right of every age and of every race? Are 
they not more properly conceived as mystic than 
as historic ? Would there be by this test any dif- 
ference between the Christian's essential Chris- 
tianity and, say, the Buddhist's essential 
Buddhism?" 

I have some friends of the Hindu race, men of 
exquisite culture and character. I used to say 
playfully that they were better " Christians " 
than I. Would I not have spoken more clearly 
and genuinely had I said " They are better men 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 17 

than I, living closer to the eternal, expressing bet- 
ter the larger Life, imitating more fully that mys- 
tic Man envisaged by all religions as eternally real 
beyond the confines of historic humanity"? 
When this complete transcendence by religious ex- 
perience of all actual or possible historic persons 
or races, forms or dogmas, is clearly understood 
the group of minds I have called " confused " will 
cease to prosper and multiply their kind. 

" But " I have friends who say " all this is 
beating the air. We've got to call this experience 
of religion something. We who are Christian by 
birth and heritage call it by the name which is 
familiar to us. Let Buddhist, Brahman, Mo- 
hammedan and the rest denote the same things 
if you will, by terms which are congenital with 
them. Let's not quibble over words." 

But this refusal to " quibble " may do a vast 
deal of mischief in the world. Practical mischief, 
too, — if clear and genuine open-mindedness is to 
be the test. Say what you please to the contrary, 
the fact is that if you insist upon calling your 
experience " Christian " then you remove from 
your inner circle your friend of another race, or 
perhaps your friend of a broader scientific and 
philosophic culture whose religious experiences 
simply have not the historic origin nor the historic 
simplicity of the experience you insist upon call- 
ing " Christian ". 

It is all a matter of clearness, you see. And 
when you consider that in another generation or 



N 



18 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

two all civilized races by virtue of international 
wars, councils, peace conferences and the like will 
have become in matters of secular and ethical cul- 
ture genuinely acquainted with each other; and 
that the average man by virtue of education in 
the cosmos-wide matters of science and philosophy 
will have broadened his horizon out beyond the 
historic places and times of humankind — when 
you consider this perhaps remote but nonethe- 
less approaching state of human society your 
inability at this time to dispense with historic 
terms becomes a really practical impediment in 
the way of human comity. The Christian re- 
ligion, as Christian^ is historic, ethnic. The time 
is perhaps remote but it approaches when Chris- 
tianity, as historic, will be classed among " re- 
ligions of the past ". There will be then a larger 
race and a more mystic religious experience, an 
experience of invisible Manhood companioning all 
the lives of all men. What men of that day will 
call their religion God only knows. Let us hope 
it will be so awful and so practically mystic that 
they will not call it anything. Perhaps its God 
will be that " nameless '' God one encounters here 
or there in every great religion, that invisible 
Man one always fronts sooner or later in some 
hidden path of his own inner life. 

It has already come to pass that one feature 
of primitive Christianity, long regarded as 
" final '% is seen to have been based upon a con- 
fusion of the historic with the eternal in religion. 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 19 

I refer to the alleged experience of the Christ 
and God as one. It is trying for us of the 
modern mind to enter into the genius and mean- 
ing of this unconscious confusion at the source 
of Christian experience. Back of us are some 
centuries of " trinitarian " controversy. The 
ideas of God and the Christ lie so adjacent in the 
mind of the primitive Christian as to be prac- 
tically, genuinely indistinguishable: to him God 
and Christ stood for no disparity of divine ex- 
perience; they were felt as practically, genuinely 
" one ". It is as if in the beginning the spirit 
of Jesus had completely invaded the minds of his 
followers, transpiercing them with a thought of 
himself just like his own experience of himself 
and the Father as one. But in our minds, whether 
for better or for worse, these two ideas are sund- 
ered: the idea of God, alas! has come to stand 
for all that is mighty, majestic, austere and awful 
in life ; the idea of Christ for all that is friendly, 
forgiving and sympathetic. The two experiences 
once well-nigh identical — the experience of 
Christ shading mystically and imperceptibly into 
the presence of God — cannot naturally be 
brought together and confused in the modem 
mind. 

And yet this is the express aim of certain mod- 
ern Christian pragmatists: to reclaim this early 
experience of God and the Christ as one. Their 
argument is practical, as they see it. Ritschl 
somewhere says " The deity of Jesus is a value- 



20 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

judgment '* : this early confusion of Jesus and 
God is valid so long as it works; it is true now 
as then because through this Christing of God 
men are brought into living touch with the other- 
wise ineffable being of God ; — by Christing God 
and in no other way. Christ is the sole practical 
point of contact between the human and the 
divine. All your logical, scientific and phil- 
osophic difficulties, says Ritschl once more, fail 
to enter that supernal world, that Kingdom of 
God, that inner life of the spirit where Christ 
does actually work as God. 

It is enormously plausible, this attempt to re- 
store in the modern mind the primitive experience 
of Christ and God as one. But it is confusing! 
It really does not work in the type of mind I 
call " modern ". Its working depends upon the 
confusion being in his case as unconscious as it 
was in the primitive experience itself. But to- 
day men's condition of mind in many instances 
is such that the confusion is consciously felt. 
The modern man, moderately well-read as he is 
in popular philosophy and above all in popular 
science, means by " God " a heaven-wide energy 
of being. He has learned something of the in- 
comparable quantities and qualities of That he 
now calls God. To him Christ, even granting 
him to be the type of the divine in the human, 
is felt not as one with but as at the opposite pole 
from This he now calls God. 

The difficulty at this point is beginning to be 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 21 

felt by the clearer minded of those who are now 
celebrating the Christ as a practical force in 
modern life. To meet the difficulty they have 
originated — or rather revived — a conception 
of the Christ as " mystic " or " cosmic." That 
Christ, they say, is not the historic Jesus nor the 
Messiah of Jewish expectation: as cosmic he ex- 
isted in the beginning; he is " wisdom," coeternal 
with the Father, the eternal Son of God and Com- 
panion of man, of equal power with God. As 
cosmic Christ is the God of the modern mind only 
with an added dimension of practical understand- 
ing and love. 

But then why not call the cosmic Christ 
** God " ? Why, once more, this reprehensible 
process of confusion between an historic term and 
an eternal meaning? Christ thus becomes gen- 
uinely universal and mystical. This Christ, this 
God of mystic oneness can by the modern mind 
no longer be confused, except consciously and 
dishonorably, with the Jesus or even the God of 
historic Christianity. He is rather the One of 
the ages ; the unseen, unknowable, undefinable, in- 
comparable source of all divine being; the Pres- 
ence in conscious science and philosophy; the in- 
visible Companion of all human life; the Eternal 
of the modem mind. 

Ritschl says that the " deity of Jesus is a 
value-judgment ": it works well to confuse Jesus 
with God. The modem man, equally pragmatic, 
says " The deity of man^ or the Manhood of 



22 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

deity is a value- j udgment! ": it works well to 
assume an invisible divinity present in every man, 
an invisible humanity present in every god. Thus 
without confusion the modern mind does indeed 
gain all that has eternal value in the Christ-idea 
and infinitely more; for in its view every man is 
a potential god, every God a cosmic Man. 

IV 

The " modem '' mind, then, as I see it, is by 
no means the average mind. Most of the men one 
encounters in a day's journey belong to the group 
of minds we have been considering as " con- 
fused '' : they would pour the new wine of modem 
culture into the old bottles of Judaic ethics and 
Christian religion. By " modern " I mean the 
rare and sincerely open mind, the man conscious 
of himself in relation to a full modern culture, 
unbound by historic forms and terms; his open- 
ness is natural and unaffected ; with his whole per- 
son and without turning back he faces the 
prospect ahead; his is a spirit of iron constitu- 
tion, radical to the very marrow, finding ravishing 
joy in trying to the heights and valleys of being 
the wings of his spirit, apt to reject as artificial 
and restrictive the familiar terms and dogmas of 
the historic church, eager to follow in the pur- 
suits of science and philosophy — in a word, un- 
afraid, unashamed and O'pen minded. 

To follow the movements of this unaffectedly 
open minded man within the last half century is 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 23 

indeed a stimulating and uplifting exercise. Of 
course he has had in his train a motley following 
of noisy cynics and sceptics. But he himself is 
a nobleman — clean and pure in his mind ; eager 
and sensitive in his soul; searching always for a 
positive and honorable experience of things 
eternal; wanting and ready at every turn in the 
spirit path to stand silent and conquered in the 
presence of That he may yet call God. 

On his honor the modern man cannot accept 
any historic religion as final, or even as express- 
ing essentially the height and depth of his modem 
insight. In his view all institutional religion is 
heavy, saturated with past forms, myths, un- 
truths, a dead weight; its terms somehow are 
restrictive and misleading, apt to damn all spon- 
taneity of spirit. In any atmosphere of conces- 
sion to this or that particular form of religious 
experience our man of iron and radical constitu- 
tion cannot abide; he feels oppressed somehow by 
suggestions and meanings he cannot honorably 
favor. 

All this merely reports a bald fact. It boots 
not so far as the fact is concerned, to accuse this 
modem mind of being over-radical; or to com- 
plain that such a man is in fact ignorant of the 
eternal values rescued by " criticism " from the 
dogma-wreckage of historic Christianity. As I 
have already suggested, these " eternal '' elements, 
in so far as they are genuinely that, are not 
historic at all but mystically, invisibly universal. 



24 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

To hold them, thus final, as peculiarly creditable 
to any historic person or age is once more 
" confusing "• 

But one need not repeat the argument now. 
The fact suffices : the modern man by temperament 
faces ahead with his whole person. He is a bad 
historian and critic, if you please; an unloyal 
child of a long line of culture that bred him 
" modem." In all this he is no doubt eccentric 
and radical; but he is true to the marrow. He 
faces forward bearing in his manner and spirit a 
wealth of past religious experience; but claiming 
all this heritage unconsciously, just as a child 
unwittingly passes on through his person the 
subtle breath of his fathers. 

Is he then a Christian? My readers wiU re- 
call two or three notable heresy trials in which 
this question was asked of certain offenders who 
were then in process of becoming " modem ". 
These men invariably replied that they were be- 
yond doubt Christian, or even " Baptist ", " Pres- 
byterian " or Gott weiss mas sonst! in the " final '% 
" primitive ", " permanent " sense though per- 
haps not in the " sectarian '', " transient '% " in- 
stitutional " meaning of the word. Now it is 
hard for the man of the modern mind to under- 
stand these subtle defenses of the modem heretic 
and perhaps even harder for him to be patient 
withal. It is so painfully uncertain what these 
primitive religions and sects were; and, anyway, 
so certain that whatever they were they are not 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 25 

now, nor are likely ever to become again! It is 
too much to expect that any Christian sect or 
even Christianity itself can ever wholly cancel 
and disown as spurious the hard and dogmatic 
features accumulated during the centuries of their 
past. It is not to be expected and for that mat- 
ter not to be desired that time will turn backward 
and make a man a child again even for a night; 
not to be expected nor desired that the human life 
will in any important respect return to the child- 
hood of the race. But just that is substantially 
what the defense the modern heretic involves and 
recommends ! — the grafting of modem culture 
upon the apostolic and early patristic stem of 
Christian culture. 

The man I call modem, whether for good or ill, 
is a man without a conscious history ; he is with- 
out any religious traditions; like John Stuart 
Mill, as he describes himself somewhere in his 
autobiography: whereas most men are in the po- 
sition of painfully breaking through the shell of 
religious tradition he is in the peculiar, free-born 
position of never having had any religion at all ; 
of facing reality with perfect and unconscious 
freedom ; with no chip of the past hampering even 
the subconscious parts of his soul. He is a re- 
ligious outcast who cannot be brought to trial; 
making no official professions he is not open to 
question by religion's professors. He has a pro- 
found respect, perhaps a sincerer appreciation, 
for the deeper things of that religion called Chris- 



26 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

tian; but I imagine that if brought to trial and 
asked if he were a Christian he would promptly 
reply " No ! " Nor would he be likely to pros- 
trate his high spirit by explaining his answer be- 
fore men capable of asking such a question. 

In all this our modern man has endured much 
hardship and contumely, many weary hours of 
spiritual loneliness. He has imagined himself cut 
off from religion not alone in its historic forms 
but in its deeper contacts as well. Failing to 
connect with any of the visible gods of human 
history, deploring all these superstitions of the 
past, he has missed the invisible, eternal realities. 
He has in many instances resorted to humanitarian 
morality and in its gracious atmosphere has found 
rest for his larger soul. He has fallen back upon 
himself as a partial and yet faithful expression 
of a future, ideal humanity. With no sense of 
divine companionship, with no eternal prospect 
or perspective for his own person, he has yet 
sought to work out a happy destiny for his fel- 
lows-to-be. He has in hot passion conceived a 
" religion of humanity ''. He has become to the 
core humanitarian in his life's processes. 

In this he has, as it seems to me, found a 
practical ideal incomparably superior to the dog- 
mas of fear and false faith too often identified 
with religion. He has saved as it were the dis- 
embodied soul of religion, the soul of goodness 
and love in all things human. Such a man is 
trustworthy enough; he is a much sweeter and 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 27 

friendlier companion in life's way than the com- 
monplace bigot in religion. And yet somehow 
he makes you sad when you join him on his way. 
He lives in such loneliness of spirit! His hu- 
manitarian heroism has in it the nobility of tears, 
the tenderness of a silent and constant sorrow. 
His Great Father is dead! Standing now alone 
he would himself vouch for humanity; he would 
in his small measure restore something of the in- 
finite righteousness and love lost in the death of 
humanity's God. The moral law after all is man- 
made and man-maintained, he says. Has it no 
sanction of any higher " power not ourselves that 
makes for righteousness " ? Very well then ac- 
quit yourselves like men; yea, like very gods! 
Is the law of love likewise a purely human in- 
stitution? Very good then; guard all the more 
jealously the great institution of love and hu- 
manity builded by the faithfulness and purity of 
these finer men, risen from the beasts of the field. 
" The gods are all dead " ? Then put a Man 
on their high throne. Poor, insane Nietzsche, 
fugitkms errans^ was after all the perfect prophet 
of this sadder, more heroic humanitarianism. 
*' The gods are all dead ; but, behold, there comes 
a Man!" 

I would not presume to address these modern 
minds, did I not belong to their fraternity. With 
my brethren of the spontaneous, open mind in 
view I have on some occasions spoken the words 
now brought together in this little volume. It is 



28 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

as it were a personal confession. It has one sole 
aim: to show, if it may, how a man of radical 
constitution may yet regain an honorable and 
positive experience of things eternal ; how he may 
fully cultivate within his modern mind that sense 
of eternal, moral companionship which is indeed 
the invisible genius of every " religion of human- 
ity ". Take seriously that exquisite structure 
you call " Man ", my friend ; give your inner 
vision of him full play; really believe in him; 
spread his mystic humanity over and beyond the 
stars up there ! Add to him an infinite dimension 
of human things like love and patience and hope- 
fulness! And you will behold That I call 
" God ''. This is what your religion of humanity 
unconsciously means, is it not, brethren of the 
humane mind? God! too unseen to be dogmatic- 
ally defined or in his fulness revealed in time; 
yet too human to be comprehended in the de- 
liberate language of science and philosophy? 
God, a Man, cosmic and yet friendly? an uni- 
versal energy unconscious in stones and stars yet 
conscious in men? divine yet human? God yet a 
Man? 

V 

Still, as I pen these lines, my spirit is checked 
by a difficulty which always disturbs the surface 
of one's deeper experience of his own mystic 
humanity. It is a difficulty of method and tem- 
perament. The more hard-headed and dispas- 
sionate of these religionists of humanity will un- 



EELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 29 

derstand and applaud this vision of the God- 
Man. " But," they will everlastingly remind you, 
*' it is no vision of what is but rather of what is to 
be. If in your defense of God as human you 
declare not merely zchat God would be in such 
a case but that he is, you are no better than 
the veriest fanatic and dreamer in religion. What 
is religion indeed but just this dogmatic or, if 
you will, mystic creating of gods in the image 
of men? Some day you too will follow your 
own God-Man brokenheartedly to that vast cem- 
etery of the soul where rest men's dream- 
gods surrounded by all the sacred relics of the 
past.'* 

Once I spoke of this invisible humanity of God 
in the hearing of Felix Adler. In an address 
following my own he approved what he called the 
" perfect music " in this service of elevation, this 
exalting of a purely ideal Man to a level of strict 
reality. But, he complained, it is not the ideality 
but just this reality of God that men are ques- 
tioning in these days. A while ago open-minded 
men were saying " God is too bad to be true " ; 
now they are beginning to feel that God is too 
good to be true ! 

Felix Adler's difficulty, as I understood him, 
is typical; and I am frank to say, it is insuper- 
able in the mind which follows in all matters the 
method of brute fact. " What " modern men 
are fond of asking " is reality in fact? " " Ob- 
serve and then report what you see ! '* they say. 



so RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

*' Do the heavens in fact declare the glory of 
God? Are things, as seen^ base or ideal? Does 
the account of reality, as it appears^ suggest 
eternal perfection or blind force as its core and 
source? " 

This method has always made short work of 
the affairs of religion. Is God obviously real? 
does he appear upon the surfaces of things? 
Well, no. Do the facts justify the soul in its 
eternal hope? No again, if you test the soul as 
it appears in some diseased state, say, in idiocy or 
senility; or if you judge by the almost tangible 
silence of the grave. Is the Power of things as 
they are also a God of things as they ought to 
be? No; positive pain and ill has always op- 
posed its spectral being in the way of every fancy 
" solution " of this problem of evil. And so on 
through a very dreary series of hard-headed and 
hard-hearted negations. 

For many years the situation was no better 
than this. On the one side there was the idealist 
displaying his tiresome, impractical wares in the 
light of the eternal; by arguments ad hominem 
persuading men to faith in an ideal state of things 
they practically knew to be unreal. On the other 
side the realist confounding the mild-eyed and 
simple-minded idealist across the way with a coun- 
ter display of hideous facts, brute-forces, mon- 
strosities, evils on all sides. Idiocy, degeneracy, 
moral imbecility, the wholesale slaughter of in- 
nocents, bom and yet unborn, and a thousand hor- 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 31 

rifying features wherein the experiment of man- 
making has most miserably failed. 

This opposition of temperament between 
idealist and realist is familiar enough. Each in 
his own way is a dogmatist; each stubbornly fol- 
lows the method of fact. The one dogmatizes 
about the surface aspects, the other about the al- 
leged " absolute " aspects of being. The dogma 
of the absolute idealist is that at its core the world 
of facts is ideal ; the dogma of the realist is that 
there is no core of being at all, but things are 
just what they seem. To the one life is deeply 
rational and good; to the other it is throughout 
irrational and bad. 

But lately a new method has interposed be- 
tween these arch-temperaments, a method called 
" pragmatism." In its spirit it disagrees with 
the dogmatism of idealist and realist alike. It is 
by no means absolute in its emphasis of ideal 
things ; yet it faces the appearance of things with 
the presumption that to act as if things were 
better than they really are would perhaps bring 
about a better actual state of affairs. In so 
far the pragmatist, as I see him, is an idealist: 
he believes beyond the facts. Again, though he 
is not abject in his vision of things as they are, 
yet he sees enough of horror in being to stiffen 
the souls of men and startle them out of the silly 
optimism of the absolute idealist. In so far he, 
as I see him, is a realist: he believes within the 
facts. 



S2 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

In all this the new method is in truth the method 
of life. In all living we assume things to be 
better, or, alas, worse ^ than they may actually 
be; and somehow in the nature of things as they 
are the inner assumption does perceptibly alter 
for better or worse the bare face of the world. 
This pragmatist then does in truth ring reality 
much more genuinely than either the realist with 
his clumsy or the idealist with his vague pulls 
upon the sources of being.^ 

Now it is the character of religion to pull upon 
being, to draw substance out of the hidden and 
unreachable abysses of being, to create gods after 
the manner of man. The modern mind needs to 
be reminded of this peculiar property, this 
creative virtue of religious enthusiasm. Its first 
step (and an indispensable step too, if it would 
profess religion of any sort, even a modest religion 
of humanity) must be away from the rugged real- 
ism of its method of brute fact toward a franker 
and fluenter enthusiasm for the imponderable and 

1 The whole universe, you remember, became " a Hum- 
bug to those Apes who thought it one ! " Just re-read 
Book III, Chap. Ill of Carlyle's "Past and Present," 
and see, 

2 Elsewhere I have outlined a philosophy called "cos- 
mic humanism," which, I imagine, will in some wise be 
the technical outcome of this fresh method. If there be 
any of my readers in whose mmd this little volume ap- 
pears rather thin and frothy in its enthusiasm for an un- 
formed humanity, an invisible God-Man, I may perhaps 
refer him to the appendix where I l\ave reprinted two of 
the articles in question. 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 33 

immeasurable facts of being. Thus, if he profess 
a religion of humanity, let him after the manner 
of the fanatic declare that there are no facts 
except Man. Let him grapple with being and 
bend all its energy along with his own human 
powers toward this thing he calls " Humanity ". 
Whenever he looks upon the stars let him see 
" Man " imaged there in the depths of being. 
Whenever he visits the plague-spots among men 
let him divest the moral imbecile he sees there of 
all his filthy rags and display underneath, once 
more, a " Man ". All this will profoundly 
change the face of the heavens and of the earth. 
And the religion of humanity's blood-sweating 
faith will not have been vain. For, doubt it not ! 
there is a region of being — what the philosophers 
call the Unknowable — where the facts are un- 
determined, where your poor human " say so " 
counts tremendously ! It is the region of " Man '' 
and " God '% the habitation of the " God-Man " 
of the modern mind. 

When the modem mind has adopted, whole- 
heartedly and whole-souledly, this method of life 
it will not ask "/5 God" but ''Shall he be.?" 
not " What is God?" but "What do we want 
him to be? " not " What are the probabilities in 
his case ? " but " How much in our own human 
case are we willing to do, how much to risk in the 
interest of God's possible being?" not "What 
may we reasonably expect from the alleged God 
of the ages, if he be?" but "What for God's 



84 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

sake can we practically contribute to his enter- 
prises among us men, granting that he is? " 

Well then what does the modem mind want 
God to be? What are a man's lasting wants, his 
eternal needs? That's the question. Then, dare 
to convert these eternal wants into resolute pulls 
upon being's sources! Enter the free region of 
the Unknowable and stake out your claims ! As- 
sert your right to find in God what your human 
life most profoundly needs ! Stake your life upon 
the trustworthiness of the eternal! Hold fast to 
that! Demand what you need of that! Believe 
in that! And, as God lives, that will come true 
in the end ! This is the method. 

VI 

As I move among men searching their souls 
and mine for some one thing which would cover 
with its principles and privileges all the multi- 
plex needs of our human lives I come to dwell 
more and more on men's want of moral compan- 
ionship in their lives. A present companion here 
on earth, a moral Presence, this is what men mant 
God to be. This is what he shall be in the in- 
visible depths of being where things are not what 
they seem but what they ought to be. Let the 
surface facts of the world appear as they may, 
the modern mind must risk its all, must contribute 
its last drop of energy in promoting this great 
unknown God, this silent Companion of men, this 
present Friend of humanity. 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 35 

As it stands, " moral companionship " like any 
other catch-phrase is a somewhat vague formula. 
But if we will examine in detail the concrete 
values of such a belief, I think we shall find them 
meeting point by point all the deeper wants of 
the modem mind. 

vn 

For one thing, God, were he real not merely 
as an unconscious power round about, above and 
within us but as a conscious energy companioning 
men in their moral struggles, would fill with 
superlative joy all the places of moral solitude 
in the world. 

We have marked the moral loneliness of the 
modern man. Lacking all sense of overbrooding 
companionship, finding in the Unknown no evi- 
dent moral friendliness, wanting in his own life 
all eternal perspective, the modern man still la- 
bors heroically for a humanity yet to be. He is 
a religionist of humanity, the most exquisite ex- 
ample, so far, of all nature's finer products. In 
him the " struggle for the life of others " has 
come to full fruition. He yields his energies 
completely to the life of the whole he calls " hu- 
manity ". All his wants, all his needs, center in 
a future Man. For him he labors, though in the 
joy and perfection of that ideal Man-to-be he 
shall have no conscious part. This is his re- 
ligion; the service of Man its only, holy office; 
his God is, shall be this Man-to-be. 



86 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

It is not with the sects and religions of the 
past but with this religion of humanity that the 
modern mind has got to reckon. In point of 
nobility and in its acual outlook this religion of 
humanity is in a thousand ways suited to the 
wants of the open-minded man: it is scientific, 
sincere, clear-headed and above all humane. It is, 
moreover, productive: it develops on earth the 
highest imaginable type of moral manhood. 
These religionists of humanity (I make no ex- 
ception) are the best men on earth to-day, the 
most heroic yet the freest from mock heroics, the 
purest yet the least pharisaic, the saddest yet the 
least querulous among the men of their day and 
generation. 

What, somewhat more precisely is the vision of 
this religionist of humanity? It is a vision of 
the human life as a continuous generation of 
moral personalities but in which no one man has 
any personal endurance. The man of to-day 
must serve the man of to-morrow by indirect 
measures. If he be a father, he must aim to 
produce in his own children a higher and stronger 
type than himself. If he be childless he may yet 
serve humanity though in a subtler and less direct 
way: he may seek to join the " choir invisible" 
of those whose deeds of goodness continue even 
after their own death to broaden and deepen the 
continuing stream of living, human souls. His 
ideal is indeed mystical: he has and holds this 
vision of a future perfected and joyful Son of 



EELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 37 

Man, Only it is a sad vision, a lonely heroism! 
The religionist of humanity by all means pro- 
motes a great enterprise of Man-making in the 
world, but is yet in himself sad and lonely. He 
sees men of incomparable goodness dying on all 
sides with no great Companion to close their eyes 
in peace and with no power on earth to make 
good the dead loss of their kindly and beneficent 
souls. The way is weary and the prospect prom- 
ises nothing to him and his fellows of the on- 
ward life. Yet he does not complain and whine 
and whimper. With quiet and very solemn dig- 
nity this merciful religionist of humanity will tell 
you that the ultimate Man of his mystic vision is 
worth the myriads of human souls sacrificed in his 
making. 

Yes, that Man is worth all the soul-stuff that 
is going into his beatific being. Any one of us, 
if he too be a nobleman of this larger Life of 
humanity, would gladly add his mite of being to 
the God-Man who is yet to be on this earth. 
What assurance, then, have we that this ideal 
Man will some day come to be in very truth? 
By what right indeed save that of believing and 
demanding, of staking our lives fanatically upon 
this Son of Man! The religionist of humanity 
says " This Man-to-be shall be. It matters not 
how the facts of brute-being may seem, this 
superlative Man shall come to be, shall triumph 
over the grave abysses of being, shall come out 
of the Unknowable onto the ground of an eternal 



38 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

reality, shall prevail and preside over all the 
powers of the world, informing all things and all 
men with his own noble impulses and passions of 
Manhood." 

Now this Is in its effect just what I mean by the 
God of the modern mind: a power of humanity 
that shall triumph in the ends of life; a humane 
Life that is becoming ever more conscious of its 
inner energies and purposes, a world-energy that 
is now taking hold with men and companioning 
them along their ways of life. In their effects, 
I say, these two views are practically identical. 
A man who believed in either would be a good 
neighbor, companion and citizen. He would 
spend his whole being toward an ideal humanity. 

What then is the precise difference between 
these views ? Why not urge a " religion of hu- 
manity " as suited to the needs of the whole, mod- 
ern mind? 

The difference is not easy to express precisely, 
though as it feels in my mind it is not inconsider- 
able. Between the humanitarian religion and 
that I am urging in this little volume, be it 
understood, there is no least clashing of ideals. 
They differ rather in the intensity of their faith. 
The Man-God is ideal with both. But in the 
one case this ideal is going to be real in some re- 
mote age and clime; in the other it is real here 
and now. The Man-ideal which the humanitarian 
hopes to have realized some day my modern man 
of ideal yet practical religion feels to be already 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 39 

invisibly and mystically real. What the human- 
itarian hopes man will become his brother of in- 
tenser faith says God nom is. The companion- 
ship which the one has only in imagination with 
a man of a remote future the other by faith has 
already with a Man of the present. The one 
hopes to claim and control the energies of the 
world to serve the needs of this future Man ; the 
other somehow feels the vast energies of being as 
already charged with human freight, as already 
companioning and working with the present man. 
The humanitarian says " I am a man and nothing 
human is foreign to me " ; his brother of a larger 
faith dares to affirm that God is a Man and noth- 
ing human is foreign to him. 

How to justify the larger, intenser faith? 
This is perhaps the gravest problem we shall 
need to face in our treatment of the case of re- 
ligion in its relation to the modem mind. For 
I make no doubt that the modem man is realistic 
rather than idealistic in his apparent tendencies 
and motives. As we saw a while ago, so much 
of mummery and dogmatism- has been foisted 
upon him under the guise of a religious idealism 
that the modern man has become thoroughly sus- 
picious of the whole method and business of re- 
ligion. There is even a certain rudeness in the 
joy with which he has broken away from these 
older fetters, a certain unnecessary heroism in his 
espousal of the individual man as godless and 
mortal in the world. 



40 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

Unnecessary, because he himself in his way is 
just as much an idealist as the man sunken in 
" dogmatic slumber ". His future Man is ideal. 
In working for the Man-to-be the humanitarian, 
just hke any other idealist, is believing beyond 
the facts. And now, a little more of this " be- 
lieving beyond the facts " and he will have a God 
fitted to the modern mind — a moral conscious- 
ness growing in the lives of men ; a human Friend 
already come to be and now adding all his uni- 
versal powers and practical wisdom to the ends 
of men, himself a real Man, the realization in 
substance of the ideal Man of a humanitarian 
religion. 

The first great want of the modem man would 
thus be realized by a simple application and in- 
tensification of his natural humanitarian instincts 
and passions. In the place then of his present 
loneliness would appear a mystic Companion, 
adding to man's poor powers something of a 
God's immense energies, to man's laboring, sen- 
suous intelligence something of divine insight, to 
man's being, ever tottering on the verge of the 
grave, something of a God's confidence in the 
reality of things unseen yet hoped for, some- 
thing of divine determination to draw from the 
unknown sources of being all that a human soul 
most deeply needs. All these divine joys are 
gifts to men out of the heart of the great moral 
Companion I call God. 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 41 

vni 

A vast deal is implied then in this conviction 
of God as a moral Companion. The modem 
man, as I see him, is full of a deep moral en- 
thusiasnu He is overflowing with philanthropic 
impulses, rich in humanitarian ideals, conscious 
of a great humane Man-energy stirring in his 
invisible depths, amazed and disgusted with any 
creature in human form who sells this deeper soul 
of his humanity for that which is shallow and 
base and mean. 

A goodly wave of this moral enthusiasm swept 
over the country a few years ago and left its 
high mark in several of our larger cities. With 
what splendid indignation did the reformers as- 
sault the strongholds of vice in these municipal- 
ities, exposing graft, prosecuting the lawless, 
cleansing the halls wherein the people's rights and 
liberties should be held sacred ! It was not child's 
play either. Men's lives were in danger. Many 
were threatened, several desperately wounded, and 
at least one of this resolute company of moral 
enthusiasts, a man down in Texas, lost his life 
in the endeavor to bring his fellows to their 
moral senses. It was all fine, dangerous, heroic! 
A man's blood still tingles with the fervor of the 
onslaught. It was a sublime event in American 
history, nothing less. In this I would want to 
be counted wholly and unreservedly on the side 
of these moral " cranks ", as they were not in- 



42 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

frequently styled. Who indeed would not gladly 
lose his good right arm, his own life, even his 
reputation for " practical common sense " and 
" worldly judgment " forsooth! rather than remit 
one jot or tittle of those finer and, if you please, 
impractical things which deepen and dignify the 
powers of manhood in the world ! 

I will not be misunderstood then, if I say that 
there was in this great wave of moral enthusiasm 
a certain vagueness and vacuity. Day before 
yesterday I talked with one of these moral en- 
thusiasts, a friend of many years standing. 
Three of the men he convicted of fraud in high 
places are now in the State's penitentiary. Again 
and again his life was in jeopardy during the 
heat of his campaign for decency and righteous- 
ness. I asked my friend what was the ground 
of his moral enthusiasm. What was his religion? 
He replied that many years ago he had given up 
thinking on such matters. In the years of liis 
young manhood he sought out the church which 
made the least possible creedal demands upon 
him (" asked the fewest questions," as he put it), 
joined that church, and since then has shut all 
such matters out of his mind! It would seem 
that in his extraordinary and persistent fight for 
decency and purity in civic affairs he has drawn 
wholly upon his own resources with no sense of 
moral companionship. His is a moral not a 
divine enthusiasm. 

My friend is still continuing the battle. At 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 43 

this moment he is laboring night and day to ob- 
struct and destroy a corrupt, political machine 
operating in his city. But in point of per- 
sistency and efficiency his case, one must feel, is 
exceptional. For the most part there is already 
a remarkable " letting up ", a noticeable relax- 
ing of the energy with which only a few years 
ago this mighty project of municipal moraliza- 
tion was launched. The explanation of this 
weakening of moral energy is to be found, I think, 
in the vagueness and vacuity of the modern 
mind's moral convictions. Men's moral passion 
was very hot but it didn't burn deep. Men had 
not the vision of the things they did as concern- 
ing the world's well-being to its very core, as 
furthering a larger Life, a mystic humanity, a 
God-Man, in the utmost deeps of his being. They 
wrought nobly and valiantly, but all in the in- 
terest of the immedi<ite law and order. That ac- 
complished, the vision seems to have disappeared. 
Soon men will be seen returning to their grafting 
places and the entire task of moral regeneration 
will need to be gone over again. This at all 
events is the judgment of so-called " practical " 
men. " After all," they are saying, " men are 
very much alike the world over. You may raise 
the level of human decency and righteousness to- 
day, but to-morrow will find men on yesterday's 
low level again. It is at best a tedious thank- 
less, hopeless business, this moral Quixotism. It 
requires leader after leader. One great moral 



44 EELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

genius must be followed by another only a few 
years or perhaps generations later in order that 
men may be saved from yielding to their natural 
moral inertia and drifting back once more into 
the dark and dirty ditches of their common be- 
ing." 

This diagnosis with its somewhat gloomy prog- 
nosis is in the main a correct estimate of the moral 
weakness of our modern life. But the remedy for 
this moral ansemia is not to be found, I insist, in 
any such temporizing tonics as are generally pre- 
scribed, each generation being left to stimulate its 
own moral energies, and so on age after age. 
All this is too vague and vacuous. It is not 
visionary enough, not tonic enough. " Leader 
after leader, age after age " you say ? Well, 
suppose we allow that mankind has had in all 
times and places of its history a solitary and faith- 
ful Leader, a very God among men, a God-Man, 
no less; whose courage and enthusiasm run un- 
brokenly through human history; whose larger 
Life is the source of all moral heroisms; whose 
superabundant energy supplies men at all times 
and in all places of right endeavor; whose cur- 
rents of being, flowing deeply and broadly in 
the way of righteousness, catch up and carry for- 
ward every drop of human energy spent in its 
same direction of increasing goodness? In this 
moral Presence men's vague and vacuous en- 
thusiasms would take on the fulness and clearness 
of an eternal vision, would gain the dignity of 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 45 

a world-wide, age-long Life of becoming good- 
ness. Generosity, honesty, kindliness, lawfulness, 
all these now somewhat fancy graces of human 
life would in such a warming Presence push their 
tender roots down to the very rock-bottom of the 
world's being. 

This is what the modem man wants God to be. 
This is what any man gains, practically and cer- 
tainly, who risks his everlasting life upon this 
belief in God as an increasing power of right- 
eousness, a humane Presence ever watchful in the 
regions of human being, a moral Companion 
among men. The thing he yesterday did vaguely 
for man's sake he now does clearly for God's 
sake! The whole prospect of future things be- 
comes transfigured in the light of this eternal 
Companion of men in their ways of life. 

DC 

The supremest gift of this man-wanted God 
is this Companionship with his humane Life. In 
the deep matters of morality, for example. The 
modern man, I was just saying, is vague and 
vacuous in his moral enthusiasm. This because 
his moral endeavors seem to him lacking in any 
eternal duration or value. His is a moral 
but not a divine enthusiasm. It is morality un- 
touched by emotion and wanting any lasting sanc- 
tion. In all this we may observe but another 
symptom of the modern mind's unconscious revolt 
from the too dogmatic and idealistic beliefs of the 



46 BELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

past. For a too dogmatic idealism tends always 
to estrange the Ideal from the Real. In the view 
of absolute idealism God and his law are inwardly 
perfect. As transcendent perfection God has been 
in eternity what man has got to become in time. 
In all this God is severely remote from the human 
life, his judgments are necessary and automatic. 
He is in the strictest sense wwmoral, having noth- 
ing in common with our processes of moral strug- 
gle. As one of my students recently said, " Ask 
such a God ' How do you do ' and he will 
answer * I don't do, / am! ' '* 

In the view of the modern mind, as it now 
stands in the world, there exists, whether con- 
sciously or not, a grievous remoteness of its idea 
of God from its idea of human righteousness. 
God is immense, superlative, incomparable; his 
glory is declared in the heavens ; he is of old and 
high degree in eternity; his laws are hard and 
fast; he is a great energy whose deepest char- 
acteristic is a " taste for engineering " : in their 
regular courses he holds the stars and planets, 
with only here and there a comet let loose! He 
works in men also by the same steady, uncon- 
cerned, mechanical forces he expends in the 
spheres above their heads. He is all this and all 
that, anything and everything save human and 
personal. Between him and us there is no point 
of conscious, friendly contact. We are all impa- 
tience, eager, strenuous, struggling, falling and 
rising; he is steady, stolid, determined, austere. 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 47 

Our life at its best is expressed in the simple vir- 
tues of the hearth-stone; his best manifested in 
the creaking, complicated motions of the celestial 
spheres. In a single word he is a foreigner on 
the shores of our human life, his perfection is 
alien to our imperfection, his superhuman cannot 
touch our human lives. 

Now I think the world has had enough and to 
spare of this tiresome emphasis and iteration of 
God's perfections and infinitudes. That God is 
immense, that he is powerful and lawful, that his 
being fills all space and informs all times — all 
these heavy claims for God the modem mind finds 
credible. Of course God is all that. But " all 
that " somehow removes him from the precincts 
of human life. I am told by a former colleague 
that the modem Mohammedan will frequently 
curse in the name of " Allah " but never in the 
name of one of the Saints! Allah is unearthly, 
superhuman, remote. The saints are earthly, 
human, present. 

Religion, if it would satisfy the genuine, spir- 
itual hunger of the modern man, must dwell more 
and more upon those parts of God's being where- 
in his character is not thus unearthly and " in- 
finite " but wherein he is in the deepest, intens- 
est and noblest sense human and " finite ". Not 
the being of God — of course that is infinite ! — 
but the character of God it is that concerns men 
deeply and practically in these latter days. 
There was a day, we may suppose, though I con- 



48 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

fess I doubt it, in the life of humanity when the 
human character depended upon this ponderous 
behef in God's absolute and invisible perfection. 
But now at any rate that day is gone. The man 
of to-day, the man of iron constitution and yet 
broken heart, has little need to be told of God's 
awful perfection, his absolute character. He has 
desperate need to be told and reassured of God's 
humaneness of being. Once more, not what God 
transcendently is but what men humanly mant him 
to be is the supreme test of that divine being, that 
larger Life on which we men must sooner or later 
stake our hmnan lives. 

What, let us ask then, must be the character of 
the larger Life in those times and places of its 
being in which it partakes literally of the human 
life? when it shares quiveringly in all men's labors 
and pains, sorrows and tragedies, successes and 
failures, graces and sins? In this the larger 
Life is just what the modern man mants God to 
be — the mysterious Companion of his daily life, 
the invisible realization of all he hopes to be, the 
ideal Man of his future humanity. God in such 
a view retains his physical infinitudes: his energy 
still fills all space and time. But to these harsher 
infinitudes the modem mind wants its God to add 
the tenderer infinitudes of a conscious concern 
with its human life: infinite patience^ hopefulness^ 
sinlessness; infinite moral action, infinite com- 
panionship in all things human — this is what we 
need and want and mean by God's infinity ! This 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 49 

is what God must and will and shall be ! At this 
human call the God of the immensities comes down 
to earth, enters friendlily, companionably into the 
region of our human passions. He is no longer 
remote and unearthly. Blaspheme not! God, 
as he lives among men, is in strictest truth the 
present Saint of human life. 

In these human parts of his nature God com- 
panions men even in ways of sin and evil. Evil, 
as God lives, is not " good in the making ", not 
just a partial phase of an eternal perfection, not 
something wholly unreal in the view of an absolute 
intelligence. It is real and positive ; of such hor- 
rible proportion in the human life that the divine 
struggle against its devastating and death-dealing 
breath is in principle and in fact uncertain ! Ex- 
cept the battle be real to men and Gods, there is no 
glory in the victory. 

The humaner religions, the religions of human- 
ity, have always solemnly and joyfully maintained 
this sense of divine Companionship ; they have be- 
lieved literally that for God as for men sin is 
horribly positive; they have found consolation in 
a God tempted even as men are ; they have taught 
men that their uncleanness counts against God; 
that the coldness of their death in sin does lower 
the temperature of the divine life, really reduces 
God's chances of victory over these powers of evil 
in the making of humanity. These humane 
religions have taught that in sadness and pain, 
in joy and pity, in hope and love — in all these 



60 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

qualities the great God, just like a man, is soft- 
ened and humanized in his life. The failure of 
a human life here or there is just so far the failure 
of God. The complete and miserable death in 
sin of a whole humanity would be the complete 
and miserable death of God! Beside this vast 
grave of a dead humanity even the great patient 
and hopeful soul of God would falter and die — 
would die of a broken heart ! Even so does God 
live and move and have his being in the spirits of 
men. 

Companionship ! Fellowship with God ! That 
is what the modem man wants and must somehow 
secure out of the invisible depths of God's great 
unknown being. The absolute power and good- 
ness of God, the inviolability of the moral law — 
all this the modern man has horizon enough to 
take for granted. What he wants to know is 
whether God and the law are humanly divine, 
divinely human. He needs to know that God's 
goodness, however trustworthy, is yet like his own 
an achievement, that God's love, however free, 
is no necessary gift of an unconscious beneficence 
but is like his own a passionate and spontaneous 
impulse out of an inwardly and consciously affec- 
tionate Soul of goodness. 



Thus we may return at last to the practical 
level on which our discussion began. Religion 
and the modem mind! If I am right in my 



RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 61 

analysis of the mystic needs of the modern mind 
in matters religious, then, once more, we may 
mark the inadequacy of the customary restora- 
tives of religion. The man who desperately needs 
God as a moral companion is not likely to endure 
the noise and clatter of the sensational preacher. 
He is not likely to be permanently satisfied with 
the " sociological " discourses of the practical 
preacher. He is certain to reprehend the confu- 
sion of his mystic experience of God as endlessly 
human with that revelation of him in a single per- 
son or race or sect which is urged as " final " by 
the apologetic preacher. 

The modern man needs a new prophet who shall 
reveal the mystic humanity of God ; a prophet of 
the universal human life and righteousness of 
God. He will bring close to man a God whose 
humane spirit has lived and grown through prac- 
tically infinite time and over practically infinite 
space; a spirit which age after age in constant 
hopefulness and patience has guided the very 
stars to serve the spirits of men ; a God-Man who 
through the ages has achieved a goodness, has 
developed a hopefulness which can never-more 
give up its experiment of love among men, so long 
as one, solitary soul continues to live in right af- 
fectionate relation with his invisibly human Life; 
a great moral Companion, living and growing 
with and through the human life; an infinitely 
human God with all of a Man's mysterious powers 
and sympathies; a personal Life transcending 



62 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

every possible intuition of our earth-bound per- 
sonalities ; a God whose human being and love are 
planet-wide and race-wide, yet a God who lives 
and grows here and now under all the conditions 
of human passion, affection, aspiration and 
struggle, only with incomparably more of wisdom, 
patience, hope and love. This is the God of the 
Ages, the God we need and want, the One who 
shall be, upon whom a strong man will risk all 
his earthly goods, and for whom a righteous man 
will risk his everlasting life. This is the religion 
of the modern man, conscious of his deepest needs 
and powers : a confident belief in the final purity, 
dignity and goodness, the actual presence of all 
his human passions in a living God. Man, an 
infinite god: God, an infinite Man. This is the 
religion, I tell you! How long, O Man-God, 
must men of the modem mind await thy prophet? 



n 

GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 



Men's reflections upon the end of life, their 
thoughts of human destiny, have always centered 
somehow in their own passions, hopes, desires; 
they have always aimed, and that right passion- 
ately, at the thing devised for them by the action 
of their practical reason, their humane intelli- 
gence. Heaven to men has always been " home," 
the reflection of their tenderest, most practical 
endeavors after peace, power and harmony. 

I set it down as a natural principle then, first, 
that your theory of life's end or destiny shall be 
native to the human beings it is designed for, 
and, second, that it shall be attainable. 

n 

This principle, as I see it, at once excludes from 
our discussion two ponderous theories of life's 
destiny. The one, the ideal of Hellenic culture, 
is canceled on the ground that in us it is not 
native; the other, the conception of German 
idealism, on the ground that it is not attainable 
by us human beings. 

The typical Greek in the days when he aimed 

at anything was a hunter of being. To him just 

to be, just to stand forthy to gather to himself 

more and more beings was in itself a suflScient 

53 



64 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

and supreme end in life. The perfect athlete, 
the perfect poet, the perfect philosopher, even the 
perfectly jolly or cynical man, — all these were, 
each in his proper sphere, " good and beautiful " 
exhibits of being. Just being, being just, good 
being, being good — to the Greek mind these 
xvere in fact simply convertible terms. What- 
ever is, is good ; not is rights for that implies con- 
sideration, implies a doubt overcome^ but is good 
— inherently, unconsciously, inalienably good. 

A vast deal of solemn literature has been pro- 
duced to explain this native optimism, this ex- 
uberant naturalism, of the Greek mind. Some 
credit it to climate, others to peninsular isola- 
tion, others again to this or that accident of hu- 
man history. In any case the fact is clear and 
indubitable: the Greek optimism was native and 
natural, a matter of temperament. The cheerful 
cynic and friendly solipsisty each sublimely un- 
conscious of the inward contradictoriness of his 
position, are typical Greeks. To us with our 
diabolical taste for conmstency they are a source 
of perennial amazement; but then optimism, 
cheerful cynicism, friendly solipsism and all that 
are not native in us. In the eyes of the Greek, 
contrariwise, whatever of inconsistency, ugliness, 
or evil may for the moment have risen to the sur- 
face of his naturally rippling life speedily sank 
of its own dead weight to the pit-bottom of being 
and was smothered there, a " hardly real " as 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 66 

Plato puts it, a practical non-entity. The 
Greek synonym for evil, you remember, was 'vAt;, 
dead wood ! Water-logged, heavy, ponderously 
inconsiderable. 

Some of the " fathers " of the Christian church 
made a desperate shift to consecrate this Greek 
notion of life's end. They said : " God is es- 
sentially ens realusvmvmiy ens perfectissimum; he 
is absolute being and your own destiny and eter- 
nal joy must consist in contemplation of, and 
participation in, his eternal perfection.'' 

But live Christians have always been frankly 
negligent of this hybrid conception of God and 
human destiny; they have always practically re- 
pudiated this end of life. They have preferred 
the more distinctly Christian idea of a specific 
and concrete heaven as their destination. It was 
sometimes a pretty ghastly heaven, I grant, but 
concrete and teeming with active life nevertheless. 
Christian culture has tended always to aim at a 
destiny in some wise human', social, home-like in 
its deeper parts. 

Whether for better or worse the Hellenic tem- 
perament with its naturalism and optimism is no 
longer native; it does and can no longer work on 
this human plane. Even those will admit the 
fact who most deeply deplore it. Nietzsche, for 
example, does most scathingly rebuke the Chris- 
tian for prostituting his strong western nativity 
before an effeminate oriental form of culture. 



66 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

But in all this he does most volubly admit the 
fact that we are no longer Greeks; we no more 
aim naturally at being. Our sole aim is not to 
get fatness whether in point of flesh or in point 
of spirit. Our ideal, I repeat, is social^ humane, 
philanthropic, sympathetic, communistic. If we 
theorize at all independently we conceive being 
not as naturally good, but as becomingly so ; not 
as perfectly wholesome, all evil being so much 
dead wood, but as painfully divided, evil being so 
much live passion to be mastered and downed by 
the cooler passion of sympathetic and socialistic 
aims. 

I would there were time to compare these two 
ideals of human destiny ; to compare them odin 
(ywsly; to affirm my entire and unreserved sub- 
scription to the humaner culture of the non-Hel- 
lenic Europeans. Such declaration of faith in 
the altruistic impulses and passions of the mod- 
ern mind might do some good in these days when 
so much is being written in celebration of Greek 
ideals. But I must content myself with the sim- 
ple fact that these Hellenic ideals are no longer 
native; we simply cannot — at least not natu- 
rally — aim at being. Most men of the modern 
mind would appear as ludicrous clowns if clothed 
in the ill-fitting modes of the Greeks.^ 

1 Perhaps Marathon races are in point. I imagine the 
shores of Elysium are lined with athletic shades who wit- 
ness with heavenly laughter our modern performances of 
that once great and natural event. 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 57 

m 

And I find I have an equal quarrel with the 
ideal of German romanticism usually taught in 
the schools as strictly suited to our modem minds ; 
the ideal, namely, of God as a perfect self. " Ab- 
solute being is God in truth," these modem school- 
men assure us, " perhaps not a natural but a 
supernatural being, perhaps not good here and 
now but good in eternity; a Life, a Self, a Per- 
son, an eternal, continuous, smooth, perfect be- 
ing, is God." You see, unlike the Greek God, 
whose being was of course infinite and naturally 
good, this modern God ozmis an infinity and a 
perfection most scrupulously thought out, and 
most laboriously fitted into the structure of our 
modem dubious life. 

Now if one were obliged to choose between 
these two conceptions: natural, instinctive, opti- 
mistic perfectness of being on the one hand, and 
romantic, self-conscious, thoroughly-cooked and 
digested, in short philosophic perfection on the 
other, I should not wonder at the man who fa- 
vored the natural unconscious belief in being's 
essential goodness. But nothing can persuade 
me that this necessity of choice is upon us. The 
point, as I see it, is that we of the modern mind 
have seen imperfection so real and present, have 
been so infernally near to, if not actually in, hell 
that we are henceforth barred from any choice 
between this or that kind of perfection. Hence- 



68 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

forth the vital consideration is not whether God 
is perfect in this way or in that ; whether his per- 
fection is natural and unconscious or rather con- 
scious and full of eternally fitting purposes. 
The important thing is to make out whether God 
is perfect at all or not; to consider whether per- 
fection applies in any considerable sense to our 
human life; to determine whether this perfection 
in God's case is by any means whatsoever attain- 
able in our human affairs. 

Now the express aim of the following pages is 
to consider " God " as a human relation, to in- 
vestigate our human ideals, even the homeliest of 
them, in the light of a possible larger Life and 
deeper Sympathy. That this one point of our 
divine relation may stand out clearly I must set 
down a few radical principles. Thus: 

A God of eternal perfection of any sort you 
will has nothing to do with any problem what- 
soever, least of all with any humanity's problem 
involving, as it must, a horde of imperfect im- 
moral beings as its irreducible data. There is no 
such thing as moral perfection in God's universe 
— if it be God's indeed! Moral perfection! 
listen to that phrase inwardly for a moment. 
Can't you hear something split? Doesn't the 
" moral " somehow crash away from the " per- 
fection " in this beautiful structure of your 
dreams? Morality carries about it the sweat of 
the workingman, the stench of his will. Or, if 
you prefer poet Swinburne's way of putting the 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 69 

case, " the perfume of manhood " issues from a 
being of such moral power. But does your in 
any wise perfect God sweat and smell of man- 
hood? Rather not. 

It needs to sprinkle a little common sense into 
our discussion at this point; to lay the dust 
which some absolute ideahst always throws in the 
air whenever you require to see clearly the eternal 
perfection set forth in his mammoth account of 
God. I confess that after many years of scrupu- 
lous consideration I am as much as ever in the 
dark ; I, stupid that I am, simply cannot see clearly 
how a thing, though it were a God, can be both 
itself and its opposite in any sense or in any de- 
gree whatsoever. Absolute idealism and common 
sense do leave me always with a perfect mess of 
irreducible contradictions stewing in my hot 
brain. Such as these, for example : 

God is perfect ; we imperfect. God whole ; we 
partial. God an individual of eternal inward 
harmony; we a society of maladjusted laborers 
after health, comfort, harmony. God is indis- 
putably One, of one mind and will ; we raucously 
many, of many minds and wills. God is fully 
and healthily That; we hopelessly and incurably 
This. Idealism and common sense could not eas- 
ily concoct two more alien beings than God and 
we! 

And now the silly controversy is on! From 
the study of the idealist there bursts forth a 
perfect cloud of dry dust* In the consequent 



60 EELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

confusion the voice of his idealism speaks these 
doubtfully consolatory and mystifying words: 
" We are ' implicitly ' all that God is ' explicitly.^ 
God is we * in so far ' as we are God. God is 
perfect in absolute degree, we in the degree in 
which we are . . . God is ' in eternity ' 
what we are ' in time.' God is good, eternally 
made-goody we are ' good in the making.' God 
is inwardly merely what we outwardly seek to 
become. God is the fulfilment, we the process. 
God solves ' instantly ' and painlessly all the 
problems we tackle in the painful experiments of 
our waking hours." And so on ad nauseam. 

Let him understand such language who can! 
As for me I am right sick of it all; the dryness 
and unreality of it all, they suffocate me. It 
all comes to this. Either: you and I are not 
really finite but infinite ; not really in time but in 
eternity; not really imperfect but perfect; not 
really in a state of social unrest and evil to be 
overcome manfully with splendid pathos of one 
soul with another, perhaps of one human soul 
with another Human Soul; but rather in a 
solemn and solitary state of eternal harmony 
wherein any straining of our human persons 
would be ill-advised and in bad taste. Either 
this, I say, or else: God, the self of selves, the 
soul of souls, is not really infinite but finite, not 
really eternal and fulfilled but temporal and in 
process, not really perfect but imperfect, not 
really beyond us in any eternal way but most 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 61 

literally and strictly with us in our human ways. 
I can neither see nor understand any other 
alternative. And the facts as common sense 
is apt to see them oblige one to adopt the 
latter view of God rather than the former view 
of man. 

rv 

" If then the Greek ideal of our human destiny 
is not native and the ideal of German romanticism 
it not attainable shall we then accept the crass 
philosophy of the modern ' humanist ' so- 
called?" someone will ask. By all manner of 
means, y^s ! But, first, let us word that humanist 
philosophy a little more particularly. 

It would discover in the human the essence and 
aroma of the divine. The difference between 
your you and your God is in the main a gross 
quantitative matter. The larger Life is larger 
than you in very obvious fact but not diviner. 
The great God himself in all his powers and 
privileges is not more righteous nor more loving, 
na diviner, than you would most instinctively 
be, had you those same great energies and op- 
portunities. You are infinite, most literally and 
prosaically infinite, — you! You, veriest beast 
of the earth! in those qualities wherein you do 
touch the living powers and the divine graces 
of the world's soul you are infinite, I say ! You 
are God's maximum as God is your maximum. 
What becomes you becomes God. Where you are 



62 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

there he is! What you are that he is! When 
you are then he is ! Your purposes, your prob- 
lems, your questions are most actually his. He 
does not fulfill nor solve nor answer them one 
whit more instantly than you. Your solutions 
are and must be his. You and he together, most 
intimately and mutually together, become That I 
have called " Man-God." 

" What is man that God is mindful of him? *' 
you ask. " What is God that thou art mindful 
of him? *' I retort. Do you dare to debase man? 
Then I dare to debase God. Nay, you have de- 
based him; for God is most literally that very 
Man whom you in your lust for material infini- 
tude have trampled in the dust. Until you are 
able and strong-souled enough to go with me 
into the filthy plague spots of men and see God 
there, most palpably degraded and besmirched 
there! I want none of your immaculate infini- 
tudes drawn, though never so knowingly, from 
the vaults of heaven; I will have none of your 
frightful infinitudes wrought in the sullen abysses 
of the world's ground ! I find such a theologic, 
macrocephalic God parenoeic, — unnaturally, in- 
humanly, morbidly, perfect ; — la grandeur! Villu- 
sion! grand Dieu! 

We need to lay this matter close to heart. Let 
me for one be simple and straight at this critical 
point: I haven't the faintest, notion what use 
future generations may make of such once sacred 
terms as " infinite," " perfect " and the like ; I 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 63 

imagine they will one day be revived and made to 
serve once more a divine function in the lan- 
guage and living thoughts of men. But just 
now I find them pretty well worked out. Take a 
plain, modern man and insist upon it that God is 
perfect, infinite and all that ; he will say : " Cer- 
tainly, of course, sure thing! But what of it? 
Does that not simply shift onto the shoulders of 
men, onto them exclusively^ the considerable task 
of overcoming the world's very ponderable im- 
perfection and finitudes? Is not God, in such a 
case of perfection and infinitude, in-cased, shut 
off, removed, inconsiderable, in-himself ? '' We 
need to lay this matter to heart. 

And the best way I know of laying this mat- 
ter to heart would be to try, seriously, earnestly, 
devotionally to try^ the alternative experience of 
God ; the experience of him, namely, as finite, im- 
perfect, becoming divine, strictly social, sympa- 
thetic, human in all his greater Energy and Life. 

There is, one must admit, a subtle and charm- 
ing perfume of infinitude pervading the per- 
fect being of God as conceived by men of the 
past; to one of mystic temperament a perfect 
God is as a very breath of his nostrils; he lives 
and, alas, dies by him ; it is a luxury, this belief in 
God's infinity and perfection, not lightly to be 
given up. He is so dependable, so luxurious, so 
ennervatvngy this God of the ages, this God of 
aged perfection. There is no denying that he is 
the God of a superfine aristocratic form of human 



64 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

culture. He is a God of no social problems or 
social instincts ; invariably he has been the idol 
of things as they are, the God of the existing 
order, the God of those who prey upon their 
weaker fellows. I except the mystics, you see; 
but the rest of mankind have invariably used the 
eternally perfect and infinite God as an instru- 
ment of exploitation, palliation, delay, delusion, 
enslavement in human affairs. Let a palpably 
imperfect and finite creature cry out against his 
intolerable fate and they will throw him the sop 
of a remote and distant perfection, a foreign 
shore, where in God he too will eventually find 
his perfect home — provided he complain and 
curse no more ! " Laissez-faire '' — that's the 
solution of human affairs invariably offered by 
a perfect God and his subscribers. We need to 
lay this matter to heart. 

Lay it to heart then! Just allow yourself to 
think unafraid, unashamed and plainly that God 
is not all this; that he does not tolerate all this 
exploitation, palliation, arictocratic insolence ; 
that he is most actively and sweatingly human; 
that his spirit is right poignantly involved in 
human relations, very strictly present in human 
being; that he moves in human destinies, writhes 
in all our human bestialities, ascends in all our 
human flights of justice and righteousness; that 
his spirit watches and pushes and pulls in all the 
efforts of our human race! God almighty, what 
a God ! God all-human, what a God ! Cry out. 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 66 

sing, shout for joy! Unto us a God is bom! 
bom of human labor! a Son of Man! himself a 
Man, a great Man-God, an incomparable God- 
Man, a God with sweating soul! 

Do you ask then whether God is simply the 
spirit of humanity? I reply that God is es- 
sentially and simply just that. There are no 
considerable facts in the universe, — in God, that 
is, — save men. God is the ideal harmony of 
these human selves. As such he is — why not.'^ 

— a spirit of humanity; a group spirit of the 
many conscious human spirits on the face of the 
world; a God-Man, as I have said. Beyond this 
is the Great-Beyond, the Vast Unknown into 
which men of to-day and of future generations, 
even as passionately faithful men of the past, 
will project a God of their own inner life; a 
Man-God, I say. In this the humanist simply 
demands and exercises the right of his surpas- 
sing, superabundant Manhood, the right of men 
who have gone before, the right of passionate 
faith, the right to pull from out the everlasting 
white-hot fires of being all that his soul does most 
genuinely require, the right to create God in his 
own image, the will to believe that out of the No- 
where, out of the Great Unknown has arisen, and 
will rise evermore, a being and living Great Man, 

— living and being by the same eternal passions 
the most lowly man may find in his own soul. 

The off-hand criticism with which your aristo- 
crat fronts this divine faith I find, — I will not 



66 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

say refutable but detestable. " How do you 
know," he asks, " how do you humanists knore 
that the God in your case does really sur- 
pass a fairly civilized man? A fine old Savage 
you make of God, forsooth ! '' 

" How do we know? " Well, to be plain about 
it, we don't know that the divine humanity we 
celebrate surpasses the highest, or for that mat- 
ter the very meanest type of human life! But 
our argument — and that we shall reiterate in 
the face of your smug rationalism, by that we 
shall everlastingly prevent your pompous digres- 
sions — the argument of human experience is 
that the God of humanity unlike your God of 
Reason — for which God be thanked ! — does not 
surpass all human types absolutely, does not 
blindly and stolidly pass by all places of human 
agony and heroism, does not lose in his great 
Life all the sweetness and braveness of human 
life! That is a simple enough argument; and 
upon that and that alone rests the strange case^ 
of the humanist — the argument of human ex- 
perience, the real presence of human things in 
God! 

For the rest I imagine — you should work 
that word " imagine " thoroughly into your 
theological vocabulary; it would relieve some of 
the stiffness of your subject — I imagine God 
as covering all types of human beings rich and 
poor, high and low, knave and fool, innocent 
young children and wise old men, human and — 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 67 

human. That's all: God knows that's enough! 
It is a matter of forming and by main force 
establishing human ideals in the world; of plac- 
ing God upon ground hallowed by our human 
feet; of doing God honor by admitting him, 
humcm as he is! into the region of our human 
privacies; of heeding the knocking of his spirit 
and admitting him to our homes. It happens 
that the highest living ideal the normal spirit 
of man has ever formed of God and his own 
destiny is not comprehended in the idea of God's 
being and perfection. His stiff being has got 
to be softened, his diabolical perfection has got 
to be humanized for men whose chief need is not 
to marvel and reflect but to live and love. Look 
down the vista of human history and, if you be 
not hopelessly blind as one who having eyes re- 
fuses to see, you will behold along the way the 
human faces of men's gods; you will see God as 
King in a kingdom, as Ruler in an ideal city, as 
Father-spirit in a great world-home; you will 
see man-like Gods walking in the ways of men. 
Their divine faces are ofttimes veiled, their names 
unknown, their hands upon their mouths, their 
forms fading imperceptibly into the Great Un- 
known. But men have lived upon these fleeting 
glimpses they have had of their gods' human 
parts, have done or refrained from this or that 
because of the presence they felt of this over- 
brooding Man-God of the ages. That is what 
you will see, I say, if you be not brain-blind. 



68 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

History alone, cold bare facts, suffice for this 
argument of human experience, this God of hu- 
man mien. 

Well then draw your inference and your 
method from the facts. Take these human ideals 
full seriously ; vitalize, idealize, transfigure them ; 
be mystic and humanistic with a right good will 1 
And you will have the royal truth of the whole 
matter. Dare to postulate God as the personal 
conscious growing spirit of human life, an 
Energy and Spirit of harmony among us human 
beings, a spirit of militant love, planet-wide and 
race-wide! This great Man-God is seeking his 
own. His larger Life is no more fair and just 
and harmonious than your human life. His Life 
waits upon, depends upon you, seeks to lead your 
human in ways of deeper and broader good will 
and sweet sanity. God ! God-Man ! Man-God ! 
God alive! he lives and moves and has his being 
in you! man-god! god-man! man-alive! In you! 
I say. He is even as a father who has his own 
spiritual problems, all unknown to his son: he is 
struggling toward a larger Life even in the very 
hour when his anxious spirit is leading the son in 
the way wherein his older soul has already moved. 
All that the Father has painfully wrought in his 
larger Life may be wrecked and ruined in the 
son's. Anxiously, full anxiously, does the 
Father-spirit wait upon us. to keep holy and 
sacred the things of his spirit. 

I conceive the World-Life to be just this: an 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 69 

ever ascending scale of living being, God the in- 
dwelling spirit of the whole, humanity a ceaseless 
generation of lives within his larger Life, hence- 
forth each man of us responsible, — not only 
gifted with life but before God respoTisible to the 
very last degree — for his part in the Life of the 
whole, each generation ideally leading on the 
generation following, God-Man the enduring 
steady patient and hopeful Leader of this pro- 
cession of human spirits within his large, gener- 
ous and courageous Life. 

Ah! the mighty, the almighty courage of it 
aU! 



For years I have accustomed myself to think 
of my God thus in concrete human terms; to 
oppose all the abstractions of the perfectionists 
and idealists with specific cases of God wherein 
the perfection or, as the case may be, the im- 
perfection of the universal Life is most humanly 
evident. Such a method does clear things, 
does emphasize God tremendously. In all the 
striking situations of life — we may let the pro- 
cession of humdrum events pass by unnoticed — 
in all the conspicuous and grave phenomena of 
human history to say and to see " God " : to con- 
sider whether the God feeling fits there: that is 
the method. A few instances will make this 
clearer, I hope. Thus: 



70 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

VI 

Once I attended in Oxford a stupendous pub- 
lic reception. The occasion was strikingly, ob- 
viously great. The world's scholars were there 
weltering and sweltering in " academic dress." 
The Lord Mayor of Oxford was " receiving '* ! 
There he stood silk-stockinged and gartered, 
knee-breeched, wooden-muscled, solemn-faced, 
closed-mouthed, circumpressed with lackeys doing 
this and that right aimlessly, — in short proper 
and magnifiquef " My Lord Mayor of Ox- 
ford!'' ... God! 

vn 
But a few months later found me intruded 
upon another academic occasion of very different 
atmosphere and intention. It was the time and 
place where a great American university was con- 
ferring its honorary degrees. I think it has 
never yet been given me to witness such quiet, 
sincere, well-proportioned dignity as invested this 
occasion. The place was pervaded by the almost 
tangible power of a great institution; men sat 
silenced by the magnificent energy of an unseen 
wisdom. The ceremonies proceeded with the 
solemn unhurried dignity of a great religious 
mass ; the voice of the university's president, de- 
liberate, steady, serious and sincere, announced 
the degrees and their causes to us who had come 
to listen. The great men thus honored, it seemed 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 71 

as if they grew in very physique under the strong 
terms of that great time and place. One, I seem 
to remember, wept like a httle child as he felt the 
degree of honor conferred upon him thus at the 
end of his long and humane career. " Doctors 
of Letters,'' Doctors of Humanity ! • • God ! 

vm 
Once I sat with a lost soul in an attic over- 
looking one of the plague spots of this earth. 
She was unclean and lean like the starving hounds 
one might see in the alley hard by. Her jowls 
and teeth were eaten away by a loathsome disease. 
For the matter of a few pennies she would have 
groveled and licked my feet: she was so low and 
hungry and damned. Poor attic hell! Poor 
damned soul! Sad frayed fabric of humanity! 
. . . God! 

IX 

There was once a man, an unlicensed doctor of 
humanity, who spoke to such, healing them and 
telling them to go their way and sin no more. 
The meagre reports yet tell us something of the 
consummate power of the man, the awful dignity 
of his humanity: he moved unhampered by 
worldly properties or social conventions, upright ! 
gigantic ! a soul of iron, a heart of sweet-healing 
oil, a Man of God ! Christ ! . . • God ! 



.72 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 



Sa you see the method. God in humanity here 
and there, — genuinely, conspiciously here and 
there, or as the case may be, alas, not there or 
here. Why not apply the method on an im- 
mense scale in order to find a genuinely, 
immensely real God? 

All these years the expert seekers after God 
have been star-gazing, deducing God in celestial 
magnitudes of one sort or another. Do we do 
some earth-gazing! Mount we together to some 
mystic height and look — down! down upon these 
habitations of men. See the great spirit of God 
settling upon people! -—IjOTd Mayors, Doctors 
of Humanity, damned souls, Christs! God 
drenching with his spirit live passionate people 
like you and me; God facing humanity, assum- 
ing human life, becoming increasingly conscious, 
active, feeling, alive, as his great searching spirit 
approaches nearer and nearer the homes of men 
and catches the low murmur of their busy heroic 
affairs. God alive! . . . God! 

There are those, you know, who would argue 
upon this mount of humanistic vision. " God,'* 
they monotonously recite, " being infinite and 
perfect, must of course settle equally over the 
world of human beings ; his spirit is concentrated 
everywhere, — no more here than there, no less 
there than here; infinite, perfect, all-wise, every- 
where! " But in that there is no vision. Come 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 73 

again up the mount of humanistic vision. Look 
down, look down! What do you see? Not what 
do you infer from your monstrously infinite pre- 
conception of God, but what do you see? You 
see the spirit of God issuing from the Great Un- 
known, the great Vault Beyond, and approach- 
ing the homes of men ; his spirit spreading itself 
passably and lightly there where men have little 
need or want of him, lingeringly and passionately 
here where some great crisis or tragedy of human 
being demands something worth while of his sup- 
erabundant Life and Wisdom. The divine spirit 
most actively concentrated where the need and 
want are greatest: that's what you see, comrade. 
God-Man! . . . God! 

XI 

" But the proofs man ! the proof ! " you de- 
mand. Alas! there is no proof. The thing we 
are here considering is too worthy to be proved. 
Wasn't it Tennyson who said somewhere that 
what is worth proving can't he proved? Well, 
such is the case here. It is a matter not for prov- 
ing but for seeing; not for demonstration but 
for vision. That mount of humanistic vision we 
were talking about is of course in your own liv- 
ing soul. Do you see there, do you find there in 
your own inner life, your own mystic humanity, 
the courage and the wUl to believe in this tri- 
umphantly and passionately regnant God of 
humanity? If not, you are blind and, so far. 



74 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

lost ! Your own humanity, such as it is, is a lie ! 
a most stupid, thoughtless, insensible lie ! nothing 
short of that! For lying, as I see it, is just the 
cutting off of a tale of human life before it is 
told, — in this instance the choking and murder- 
ing of your humanity at just the point where it 
would begin to live eternally. 

This is what I mean by being " divine " : a 
God-Man not by any manner of means absolute 
in his being but by all manner of means absolute 
in his ideals, impulses, passions. In all that is 
human he must and shall and will be absolute,- — 
tenderly, compassionately absolute; absolutely 
patient, absolutely hopeful, absolutely loving, 
absolutely brave, absolutely human! 

Now do you ask for evidence? Just open 
your soul to it; it will overwhelm you, once you 
see it. Do you mean to say you lack evidence 
that a spirit of Life larger, deeper, higher than 
the life we call human is at work in the world? 
that a great humane world-soul is toiling and 
sweating with men? that sin is destructive and 
goodness conservative of that Life? that the prin- 
ciple of increasing righteousness is regnant and 
shall — perhaps not must but most certainly 
shall — triumph over the lowering lusts and pas- 
sions of that Life? Who wants evidence of all 
this, I say, is denying his own humanity, is des- 
ecrating his own inner place of vision, is lying in 
the face of Man and in the sight of God ! 

A challenge to faith! Live like a human 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 75 

being! You will engender deep within your 
human soul a perfect passion of belief in things 
human, a perfect feeling of companionship with 
God-Man in all your ways of life, a steady and 
calm determination to risk all, all your interests, 
your ambitions, your hopes, your powers, your 
life, upon the issue and ultimate triumph of 
humane being, of Man-God ! For you will have 
seen out there in humanity's unformed future a 
destiny of human Life toward which and in 
which your human and God's human being to- 
gether are working with a right good will. To- 
gether then! On! On! For humanity's sake, 
for God's sake, on ! 

That man alone blasphemes who abuses in what 
way soever this deeper humanity of him; who 
cheapens his human life and robs himself of his 
own rightful, creative operations in Life. Man 
alive! God does most imperatively rest upon 
your life. Put your shoulder to the wheel! 
Sweat, bleed, strain, heave, love! Live like a 
human being ! Live like a God ! 

The whole weight of the universe does rest 
upon your shoulders and his ; upon yoUy Man, and 
upon himj God-Man. Your life in his is mystic- 
ally clothed in garments incomparably beauti- 
fuler than these poor rags of humanity now visi- 
ble to our naked eyes. Who or what can visibly 
cover the immeasurable breadth and width and 
depth of humanity's God of firm and patient and 
hopeful Life? Life increasing and abundant; 



76 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

universal Life; a willing and glad symphony of 
live persons, men, supermen, angels, gods, God ; — 
a harmony of real people, half-human, half- 
divine, half -men, half -gods ; men becoming gods, 
gods becoming men ; — a universal communism of 
man and God, God-Man, Man-God: that is what 
one sees and, seeing, puts his shoulder to the 
wheel, helps move in the energies of the God-Life^ 
participates in the making of God-Man. 

xn 
I have always felt this quality of unconquer- 
able humanity in Stevenson. Even on his very 
gravestone, you remember, he would have it chis- 
eled that he laid him down " with a will." If you 
can listen to his lines on faith without feeling the 
sharp sting of them, then go bury thyself in the 
world ground, out of sight of all living creatures ; 
for you may know that your soul is insensible, 
mortified and dead indeed. Thus: 

" God, if this were enough. 

That I see things bare to the buff 

And up to the buttocks in mire; 

That I ask nor hope nor hire. 

Nut in the husk 

Or dawn before the dusk. 

Nor life beyond death ; 

God, if this were faith. 

" Having felt thy wind in my face 
Spit sorrow and disgrace. 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 77 

Having seen thy evil doom 

In Golgotha and Khartoum, 

And the brutes, the work of thine hands^ 

Fill with injustice lands 

And stain with blood the sea; 

If still in my veins the glee 

Of the black night and the sun 

And the lost battle run; 

If, an adept. 

The iniquitous lists I still accept 

With joy, and joy to endure and be withstood. 

And still to battle and perish for a dream of good; 

God, if that were enough. 

** If to feel in the sink of the slough 

And the sink of the mire 

Veins of glory and fire 

Run through and transpierce and transpire. 

And a secret purpose of glory in every part. 

And the answering glory of battle fill my heart, 

To thrill with the joy of girded men. 

To go on forever and fail, and go on again. 

To be mauled to the earth and arise, 

And contend for the shade of a word and a thing 

not seen with the eyes: 
With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night 
That somehow the right is the right 
And the smoothe shall bloom from the rough : 
Lord, if that were enough." 

This is Stevenson: to thrill with the joy of 
girded men, to go on forever and fail, and go on 



78 EELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

agam, to be mauled to the earth and arise^ to 
contend for a thing not seen with the eyes ! This 
is Stevenson who, tradition says, when a disease 
of the lungs disabled beyond usefulness his good 
right arm learned to write with his left ; and who 
when the disability claimed his left dictated to an 
amanuensis for hours and days; and who, when 
at last he could no longer speak for very weakness 
of his despoiled chest, learned to speak with his 
still free, though unarmed, fingers the mute lan- 
guage of the deaf and dumb, that he might yet 
with his very last drop of energy express in some 
wise the still buoyant, broken hopes of his trium- 
phant soul! This was Stevenson, — an atheist, 
some called him ; let us rather crown him suprem- 
est, bravest man-god of them all; deepest com- 
muner with the invisible heroisms of human life; 
prof oundest believer in God-Man ! 

" Lord, if that were enough." Ye men of iron 
hearts ! it is enough and to spare. Grasp it and 
share it, spread it abroad generously over this 
great sea of humanity weltering before you into 
the shoreless regions of eternity, this unconquer- 
able humanity! The eternal human: the eternal 
divine; the eternal man: the eternal God; God- 
Man : Man-God everlasting ! 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HOME 79 



xm 



A myticism of the will, I take it ; — and accept 
it, too. I can fully believe that such mysticism, 
if need were, would create God; and pull some- 
thing of a like courage and human conscience 
from out of the very bowels of hell ! Be a man 
then, you atheist so-called; be a man, a full man, 
scrupulously right and brave, unashamed and un- 
afraid in all your actions, spewing all vileness 
from your soul ! Be gigantic ! in your own per- 
son stand as straight and as high as yow are, act 
as if there were a God ; yea, as you were a god ! 
And one of these days, when thus you stand forth 
there in all your dubiety, yet in all your risen 
Manhood, you will see God — it may be created, 
awakened, aroused in some measure by your own 
very strong power of regnant Manhood. As God 
lives ! it shall be even so. And then — the aw- 
fuler power, the deeper understanding, the won- 
derfuler companionship of your kind of God will 
be yours forevermore. Forevermore! does that 
not mean forevermore ? 

Be an atheist, friend, if you must in all con- 
science. But avoid cynicism and indolence of 
soul as they were the devil's own vices. Be quick 
and noble, oppose all idleness and scornfulness of 
spirit; and your weighty atheist though you be, 
will pull on the diviner scale of the world's pow- 
ers ; you will, all unwittingly, help God ; you will 



80 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

in the end of your life willingly yield to the mas- 
terful soul of him I call Man-God. 

Let William James speak a word to us in this 
matter. God knows he is pagan enough: they 
say he doesn't pray any more! Well, in the 
words I now quote he prays all unconsciously, yet 
actually enough to lead us through doubt to a 
reliable method of faith. Thus: 

" If this be a moral universe ; if by my acts I 
be a factor of its destinies ; if to believe where I 
may doubt be itself a moral act analogous to 
voting for a side not yet sure to win, — by what 
right shall they close in upon me and steadily 
negate the deepest conceivable function of my be- 
ing by their preposterous command that I shall 
stir neither hand or foot, but remain balancing 
myself in eternal and insoluble doubt? . . . 
He who commands himself not to be credulous of 
God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may 
again and again be indistinguishable from him 
who dogmatically denies them. Skepticism in 
moral matters is an active ally of immorality. 
Who is not for is against. The universe will 
have no neutrals in these questions. In theory or 
in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like 
about a wise scepticism, we are really doing volun- 
teer service for one side or the other.'* 

Be credulous of God: that is the method, the 
way of all life, the way of faith. And if you will 
thus be credulous of God you may by the same 
token develop inwardly the most precious creed 



GOD AND THE WORLD-HGME 81 

your soul can imagine or ask of the great world's 
soul — a full creed in very human truth, a creed- 
ful of invisible imperatives, of eternal verities, of 
everlasting humanities. Your ample creed will 
cover and protect and sanctify all that your hu- 
man life can want or hope for of comfort, power, 
efficiency, decency, sanity, bravery in life. 

Among my more intimate documents I have a 
letter from just such a masterful man. He is 
dying away out on the " great divide " of the 
Rocky mountains. His life has staggered under 
blow after blow of fate. At each turn of the 
road he has lived dutifully, manfully, naturally 
and unaffectedly leaving the pleasant prospect he 
once had seen before him in his life and quietly 
taking, without even so much as a looking-back 
or a whimper, terribly rough courses; courses 
which you and I, my friends, would have shrunk 
from, I'm afraid. The disease which now carries 
him ojff into the Great Unknown, that mysterious 
" Perhaps " beyond this life, he contracted, I am 
told, in ministering to a similarly stricken sister. 
He is to my mind a nobleman of high degree. 

I had written him telling him of my great 
pride and fondness of him : he had once been my 
student; and telling him something of the cour- 
age and wisdom I, the teacher, had found in him, 
the pupil : how he had taught me great things all 
unconsciously. He writes to this effect : " Some 
days I am better, others worse. I am still strong 
enough to work an hour or so a day in the field. 



82 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

This keeps my body and my soul together. 
When they are no longer together what will befall 
me I do not know. I can only doubt and hope 
and love — that's all." 

But God knows, my friend, that's enough! 
With what more, in God's name, can a man face 
reality? with what more of character? with what 
more of rightness? with what purer garments of 
humanity, nay, of divinity ^ can a man clothe him- 
self ere he go upon his long journey? — than 
modest doubt, strong hope and self -destroying 
love ? 

Courage, comrade! out there on the great di- 
vide, out there on the universe's great divide! 
Listen ! let your soul hearken toward that Silence 
of Eternity ! What is that articulate, mysterious 
breath of God saying? "Hasten on with me, 
thou great strong man, thou child of immaculate 
soul, thou heart of my Life, thou Man of my 
Soul. Together, through eternity together^ we 
shall ' doubt and hope and love — that's all.' " 



Ill 

LIFE EVERLASTING: ITS CONDITION 



The spiritual forms on which men have woven 
their growing lives are, as it has always seemed 
to me, singularly few and simple. How many 
things, how many stupidities^ do you believe? O, 
say perhaps a thousand or so. How many things, 
how many realities^ do you need to believe? 
Well, say about ten, more or less. Is that not the 
reply of past generations, the judgment of his- 
tory ? 

Given ten, more or less, flexible and limpid be- 
liefs, you are equipped for life now and everlast- 
ing ! Keep the currents of your being spontane- 
ous and free; flee for dear life from all dog- 
matisms and their " categories " ; hold your soul's 
home simple and comfortable with an equipment 
of, say, ten changeable and yet substantial neces- 
sities, rules, regulations, beliefs ; you are fixed for 
all times and places of God's home. Remember 
the " woes " of that once giant of Nazareth : ut- 
terly oust from your life all the Scribes and 
Pharisees, not those merely whom you may en- 
counter on the street, — they are of such sour 
mien altogether that one easily casts them out — 
but those also whom you may feel operating in 
the secret places of your soul; the scribal and 



84 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

Pharisaical creatures of your very mind ; the inner 
tendency to harden and dogmatize ; the inclination 
to fix the living impulsiveness of your inner lives. 
The point is, to keep open-minded, spontaneous, 
free, limpid, flexible, radical in all matters that do 
genuinely matter. 

Take, for example, that word " eternal " which 
shall concern us in these following pages. What 
a ghastly, monstrous thing the scribes and Phari- 
sees have made of it ! Just think of being impris- 
oned in that damnably perfect state they describe 
as eternal! just imagine being held there beyond 
even the power of death to set you free ! just con- 
sider your soul, an entity, grinning out its imper- 
ishable life in sickly eternal beatitude, or else, 
more's the pity, gnashing its spectral teeth and 
wailing out its hopelessly eternal life ! Whenever 
a man tells me his soul is necessarily eternal I want 
fto reply, " Ay, and by the same token it is hope- 
lessly eternal; — hopeless, whether in heaven or 
in hell." 

The trouble is that we have in our Christian 
eschatology (as the technical term has it) an at- 
tempted confection of two most alien elements, the 
one Judaic, the other Hellenic. The Jew's con- 
ception of future things — I mean even his idea 
of his own race's future, granting to the critics 
what in my uncritical moments I very much 
doubt; namely, that the Jew had no vision of a 
future after death — his idea of future things, I 
say, was full of a very concrete and splendid 



LIFE EVERLASTING 86 

imagery; it was a place of life, a condition of 
active, progressive righteousness; its only alter- 
native was not an eternally congealed, passionless 
heaven nor yet an eternally molten, evenly white- 
hot hell; the only opposite he could conceive to 
this natural and faithful Life was — Death ! 
" See, I have set before thee this day life and 
good, and death and evil." " I have set before 
you life and death, blessing and cursing: there- 
fore choose life that both thou and thy seed may 
live; that thou mayest love the Lord thy God; 
that thou mayest obey his voice, and that thou 
mayest cleave unto him ; for he is thy life and the 
strength of thy days." 

Future things looked far otherwise to the 
Greek. In his view life here is no specially stren- 
uous, affair, no austerely arranged matter of 
righteousness. The thing is, to live naturally 
while you live, to follow the natural course of 
human events, to express your proper genius for 
the sheer pleasure of the thing itself, to live natu- 
rally, to die naturally and then enter Elysium 
naturally. " What is Elysium ? " you ask. 
Well, it is what you might naturally expect. 
What could a disembodied, fully expressed soul 
be but a shade, a ghost, a naturally empty, con- 
templative sort of soul in that same sort of eter- 
nal life, a spectral, phantasmal kind of being? 
To discharge his will and his genius fully here 
in this life, then to walk contemplatively and so- 
berly among the shades of Elysium — all this 



86 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

seemed proper, natural, desirable to your typical 
Greek. 

Now our modem heaven or hell is, as I was 
just saying, an attempted confection of these two 
essentially alien elements, one drawn from the 
genius of Jewish, the other from that of Hellenic 
culture. As Judaic, heaven and hell are concrete, 
explicit, filled with fleshly men and women. As 
Hellenic these mythologic places are static, fixed, 
full of vague harmless shades of being. In Chris- 
tian tradition the alternative of Life is no longer 
imaged as natural death but as unnatural life; 
life eternally and hopelessly balanced in " sanctifi- 
cation " with its very proper rewards or in sin 
with its very hot torments, world without end, 
world without change; a world most dull and 
deadening; in heaven every prospect equally rav- 
ishing, in hell every spot equally hot. 

In such a state, any psychologist will tell you, 
the psychophysical organism he calls the soul 
could not endure for long; it must needs die of 
very dullness ; there is no stimulus^ he will explain, 
in a steadily unremitting pain or pleasure ; — no 
stimulus, no response, no life in the end. The in- 
evitable outcome of such a psychophysical per- 
formance as would go on in heaven or hell would 
be — msensihility. 

There are those who will complain that this is 
a rather shallow caricature of the Christian 
eschatology. Well, that points my argument: 
the Christian eschatology, once you clear it of 



LIFE EVERLASTING 87 

confusing, learned interpretations, is shallow; 
itself is a caricature of two utterly diverse ideas 
. of future things : Judaic moral vitality/ and Greek 
naturalism. The man of militant righteousness, 
the Jew, actually fighting death and sin; the 
Greek, a man of contemplative, healthy-minded- 
ness, actually living a present life and amusing 
himself meanwhile with speculations upon pure 
goodness and pure being — these two men do not 
naturally mix together. Whenever the Jew 
caught a vision of the future he saw a Jew there, 
or his race there if you will, busily engaged in 
the way of righteousness; whenever the Greek 
had a vision of his future soul he found it a shade 
moving deliberately and vaguely here and there 
in a wholly phantasmal, future world. Such di- 
verse temperaments can unite only superficially. 
The combination of such disparate world-views 
into heaven and hell must needs be shallow. 

As for me I prefer the Life-and-Death con- 
ception in all its original purity. In all sober- 
ness of mind I declare I would rather die than 
go to heaven — unless it were on the very fron- 
tier of heaven, on the borderland of hell, in the 
celestial slums, far from the shades of heaven, the 
Graeco-Jewish scribes, Pharisees and doctors of 
eschatology! On the borderland of hell, on the 
frontier of heaven, where common people are still 
getting saved, give me endless life there ! There 
is something worth while ! Sweating through the 
day, then intelligibly resting by night ; spreading 



88 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

the spirit of sweet brotherhood abroad to cool the 
hot Kves and cheer the broken hearts of one's 
fellows; living! freely, limpidly, gloriously liv- 
ing! verging always upon sorrow, catastrophe, 
hell ! but keeping spontaneous, courageous, man- 
ful ! measuring eternity not in years — God ! how 
weary, how deadly dull the years, were they 
throughout eternity blissful, fulfilled, uneventful, 
unangered, serene and all that silly dream of idle 
souls! — but in instants, the instantaneous mov- 
ing out toward Life or Death or God knows what ; 
with no pusillanimous thought of what, but only 
with surpassing joy and eagerness for the work 
and life of the passing time. Is such a Life not 
eternal in God's world? Then so much the worse 
for God, I may say. 



We may gather sweet wisdom in this matter out 
of the mouths of babes and sucklings. How 
does a child live its days.? Well, for one thing, 
it solves its ultimate problems by the process of 
living. Have you ever watched a living child 
at its play.?^ If not, your philosophy can in no 
wise follow the method of life. In his child's play 
you may observe in all naked simplicity the proc- 
ess of living. See him play, then! A problem 
arises at some point in his otherwise fluent game. 
What does he do? Does he hesitate? does he con- 
coct a consistent and completed plan for the fur- 
ther conducting of his living enterprise? does he 



LIFE EVERLASTING 89 

ratiocinate? By no means. He simply alters 
by a hair's breadth, or it may be radically, the 
original plan of his play. Perhaps the rude 
thing that does seemingly stand there, an imperti- 
nence and impediment in his way, he plays is not 
there; thereby reducing its impedimental propor- 
tions, if indeed not removing them altogether, 
root and branch. The child life is, in a word, 
free, fluent, limpid, uncategorical. And he does 
in very truth live in a world likewise plastic, fluent, 
playful. 

It is only since Groos published his books on the 
Play of Animals and the Play of Man that we 
have come to a fair understanding of this playing 
instinct. For it is an instinct, he tells us. As 
such, it does work ; it does preserve the life of the 
child-animal and animal-child. The world they 
inwardly image in play is just the outwardly real 
world they front in later life. The region of 
their plays does open out imperceptibly and un- 
brokenly into the region of their larger and sol- 
emner concerns in life. 

Perhaps the great world is in very truth a 
play-ground, a fighting-ground, — a real home, a 
real heaven, a most genuine Valhalla? Perhaps 
if you play here in all childlike seriousness, you 
too will find that the world of your inwardly as- 
sumed beauty and goodness and harmony is just 
the outwardly real world which your not playful 
fellows, God pity them ! declare to be ugly, hard, 
material, godless, devilish? Perhaps if you live 



90 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

here and now as if you were an immortal god 
of a sort you will find that your playing at 
divinity has in solemn effect prepared you for a 
real world, a real future divinity you will front 
after death? Perhaps the region of your play- 
ing at divinity will shade imperceptibly and un- 
brokenly into a region of larger, invisibler reali- 
ties of Life? Well, children anyway find play- 
ing a good instinct ; they never quite know when 
the play ceases and the reality begins; they are 
not conscious where earth knocks off and heaven 
begins, never quite mindful of the difference be- 
tween make-believe and reality. Perhaps, as 
things invisibly and indubitably are, there is no 
such difference. It is a good instinct, surely, that 
goes naturally and playfully from childhood to 
old age. Why not a trustworthy instinct that 
would go naturally from old age to Death, — 
nay, to Life? 

If you complain that you do not find this argu- 
ment convincing, I reply that you have misun- 
derstood me utterly, from beginning to end; for 
I am not arguing at all. I find arguing in such 
matters unprofitable and even hateful. I have 
seen men interpose arguments, protests, realities, 
cold facts, into the plays of children. I for one 
am just child enough to doubt whether their 
alleged realities were cold facts after all; just 
child enough to hate them for their complacent, 
solemn, brutal interruption of Life's Game, 



LIFE EVERLASTING 91 

Your contemptible vender of solid facts is a pub- 
lic nuisance and should be outlawed on Life's 
Play-ground. He is a foreigner there, knows not 
the language of those playing there, nor has he 
any unspoken understanding of the serious play 
going forward there. Off with him to the dun- 
geon! He will be happier there, I think; for 
in that abyss bottomed with hard facts he and his 
tribe of fact-collectors may rap this and that 
solidity to their heart's content, world without 
end. They won't ever discover that they are not 
in the real world of God's sunlight and changing 
seasons; that they are instead in the very pit- 
bottom of being. Off with them to their dun- 
geon-heaven, then ! 

In the upper region of God's everlasting sun- 
light, where flowers may still bear fruit, and men 
are growing to a fuller stature of Manhood, where 
things are not solid in fact but subject to the will 
of man, fluent in the will of God, — in that upper 
world we must become as a little child ; like a little 
child hoping and believing all things; eternally 
playing right really, right seriously; knowing 
nothing except a quick responsiveness to all the 
swelling processes of Life. In the most literal 
sense must we leave the rest to God — hoping and 
believing that in his great world-home, in his im- 
measurable battle-ground will be found fair fields ; 
everlasting breathing-spaces; goodly instruments 
of living being innumerable; Life evermore. 



92 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

Does God not thus environ us with possibilities of 
life, life, life! then so much the worse for God, as 
I have said. 

m 

When you ask the child on what solid ground 
his play rests, or what its certain outcome is to 
be, you spoil the whole business for him. The 
very soul of it, and of him too, subsists upon in- 
securities, possibilities ; the very zest of his play- 
ing and being lies in the power he holds and wields 
of changing the program; of playing good and 
bad, good-man and bad-man, God and Devil, with 
the self -same instruments of life and on the self- 
same ground of being. A play planned for him 
in its every detail and enduring, suppose, for even 
an hour or so is to the natural child a most un- 
mitigated abomination with no touch of attrac- 
tiveness in the whole wearisome prospect. He 
must have range, freedom, prospect of change, 
power of alteration, risk, — or he dies. 

Well, it is even so with men of iron constitu- 
tion. In this great affair of everlasting life, for 
example, how they despise and refute your argu- 
ments and your descriptions ! You begin to coun- 
sel with them, saying: "Immortality is proved 
thus and so." But before you have done speak- 
ing they are off into regions of untried and un- 
proved possibilities of being. Just essay to de- 
scribe the " next world " to him ; scrupulously 
avoid putting into your description any dash of 
fairy-land where an unheard-of and as it were im- 



LIFE EVERLASTING 93 

possible thing may happen at any moment, where 
abysses may open up or false by-ways lead a 
man to a lower region if he do not watch out — 
describe the " next world " to him with this pain- 
ful and patient accuracy^ I say, and in the end 
of your efforts you will find him gone in a scep- 
tical disregard of your pretty exactitudes and with 
a barbarous immediate joy in the next step, — 
whether into a next world or not, who knows ? Is 
a next world there? So much the better for the 
man who enters it full-fledged, full-grown. Is a 
next step not there? " So much the worse for 
the God of things as they are," he says. What 
the next world is or even that it is is, as he sees 
it, a matter beyond the beginning of your knowl- 
edge and in all regards beyond the ends of your 
voluble descriptions. 

I have observed that children and natural men 
do actually live upon mystery. To both, your 
literalist, your absolutist, your rationalist is of all 
creatures on God's earth the most pestiferous and 
preposterous. To them, I mean children and 
strong men, all life is impulsive, passionate, spon- 
taneous, free, risky. To him, I mean your cool- 
headed, cow-eyed rationalist, such natural life is 
loud, coarse, in bad form, ill-advised, over-heated, 
childish. I must say that I cannot feel the force 
of the latter's argument ; it is so ponderous that 
it does not really hit one; it passes one by like 
some monstrous opaque body, eclipsing God's sun 
for a moment but soon lumbering on into that 



94 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

shoreless region where float in utter vacuity all 
such dense, inconsiderable monsters of the world's 
being. In passing on his way to that monstrous 
region he condescends to tell you that your life 
is too passionate ; that you are too impulsive ; that 
you are a fool to take the risks you do in being ; 
and all that. And all that he calls argUTuent. 
Why ! it is no more than description. He leaves 
open the whole question of fact. Is life perhaps 
not all the better for being just what he describes 
it to be: impulsive, passionate, childlike? That 
question, I imagine, will be everlastingly open. 
You will never know whether or not it had been 
better to have lived sedately or passionately, 
agedly or youthfully, conservatively or radically, 
until indeed you have come to life's end; until 
Being's Great Decision has been handed down in 
the world's ultimate Judgment. That is, never. 
For there is no life's end, there is no ultimate deci- 
sion, no absolute Judge. I see no help for it: 
we've just got to take a chance, to follow our own 
native instinct, our deepest soul in this matter. 
Live hotly if you he sincerely passionate, calmly 
if you he incurably anaemic. Be yourself in any 
case! By that means, or else by no means, you 
will fit yourself for Death, or for Life. 

A man with any iron in his constitution, with 
any zest of youth in his no matter how aged veins, 
will be apt to cast his vote on the side of the great 
world-soul's passions, the great God-Man's zest 
in life, the great Man-God's appetite for life ever- 



LIFE EVERLASTING 95 

lasting. By this I do not mean to celebrate 
undisciplined souls : yet for the life of me I can- 
not but recognize in them a certain native strength 
and health of mind. Thus Whitman, Carlyle, 
Nietzsche and a plenty of others were of this un- 
disciplined type. In one way or other they have 
done a bit of mischief in the world, and no mis- 
take; — mischief, that is, among unbridled, unli- 
censed, young fools! For that I am sorry 
enough; but I can understand mhy they burst 
forth, why they so spectacularly and madly broke 
over their traces. It was because they were irri- 
tated past enduring by the wooden steadiness, the 
hauteur, the very hateful complacencies of the 
world's godly authorities. Not to know even the 
beginning of lust or life or work, to live in a 
studied disregard of the sinner's hot body, or of 
the worker's sweating brow and aching soul, to 
steadily celebrate a God of your own making 
whose sole raison d^etre is that he suits you and 
authorizes your sort of life in all its idle, emas- 
culated propriety and calm sanity, — there is no 
authority in that. That but breeds passion, re- 
volt, atheism in strong men, — - and in children. 
From such a studied propriety children and strong 
men always shrink fearfully away. To them 
your self-conscious arrangement of life's spon- 
taneous activities is nothing short of life's death 
and destruction. 

Life, as one should see it, is playfulness, pas- 
sion, power not abused but mastered, not dissi- 



96 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

pated but concentrated; life mastered and con- 
centrated upon a something eternally unformed 
and unmastered ; life ever becoming, ever coming 
to be ; life eternally facing a mystery of possible 
being and power ; life bristling with passions mas- 
tered, sobered, solemnized, worlds without end; 
life, a Beyond ever opening out and blooming 
with the flower of manhood ; eternity, the reckon- 
ing of this everlastingly unrealized Life! Men 
of iron constitution, even as children in the mys- 
terious rites of their play-world, will always ac- 
cept this mystery of Life's continuously unful- 
filled Game. For them there is no charm in that 
fulfilled, eternally doddering, senile Proper-Life 
portrayed in the world's Book of the Wise; no 
risk, no life in the categories of your worldly- 
wise, quite dead authorities. 

The man of iron, if you look down upon him, 
appears as an enfant terrible^ an enfant perdu in 
fact. " Is he not a child lost in being, making 
a foolish and terrible game of life.^^ " This is the 
perennial query of the world's psychophysical 
anaemics. The judgment from immemorial time 
of the lookers-down upon life's places of battle 
and sin has been that the whole thing, all that ac- 
tive battling life down there is a foolish, wasteful, 
over-impulsive, over-passionate business ; " really 
somewhat vulgar, don't you know." The look- 
ers-down naturally wonder why these busy, con- 
tentious workers down there don't look up now 
and then. "Why don't they look up?" Has 



LIFE EVERLASTING 97 

it never occurred to you, dear looker-down, what 
the true reason is? These men's business in life 
is so vital, so soul-involving, so immediate, instant, 
quick, that they, unlike you, have no leisure to 
enjoy the eternal prospect. One glance upward 
for them! and then they must back and down 
again into the midst of the world's great spon- 
taneous, passionate Life. 

" Can it be," you ask, " that these rude, strong, 
passionate men are indifferent then to the pros- 
pect of divine things, of future life, and all 
that ? '' No ; if you will but descend from your 
high place of conventional securities and risk 
living for a season with these uncouth, pragmatic 
men, venturing with them upon their own plane 
of uncertainties and humane risks; you will find 
them not stolidly indifferent to the prospect of 
life, even of everlasting life, if only it be viewed 
from their level of real life. Your plain man 
does indeed view with a certain contempt and 
wholesome resentment your frantic attempts to 
penetrate the mysteries of the future, your nerv- 
ous endeavor to throw yourself, as it were hodily^ 
over into a region he conceives to be utterly prob- 
lematic and unknowable. He wants little of your 
metaphysical arguments and still less of your 
psychic researches. As a class these robust men 
are in truth sceptics on the side of their pure rea- 
son; — who indeed is not in such wise sceptical? 
But you will not find them stubbornly opposed to 
any vision underlying your arguments and re- 



98 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

searches. They protest not against that^ but 
rather against the to them miserable caricature 
your contentions and evidences make of that in- 
visible Life-beyond-life they heroically accept 
without argument and without visible facts to 
support their case. A man of patient and pas- 
sionate faithfulness, the man who is ready to risk 
his everlasting life upon the grand assumption, 
the great " Perhaps " that the world is in God 
eternally, inwardly, reliably good, — such an one, 
I say, feels there is danger in all this arguing and 
whimpering and scurrying about it and about. 
He has watched you up there on your plane of 
lofty argument and occult experiment. And he 
has observed that you have sometimes lost your 
awareness of eternal life in your desperate battle 
of words. In his inmost soul your man of iron 
feels this condition of life itself; the condition, 
namely, of able-souled fitness for life, of spiritual 
readiness for any world whatever of living real- 
ity. Meanwhile in you he sometimes finds this 
readiness and fitness to live perilously reduced 
and obscured by all your wasteful conjectures and 
experiments in future things. 

You cannot have lived long In the world of real 
men without having observed this: that your 
speculative arguments, mystical appeals and sci- 
entific demonstrations find a response only in 
souls already in advance of your argument; in 
lives whose fitness and readiness for the Thing 
itself, the everlasting thing itself, is already ha- 



LIFE EVERLASTING 99 

bitual and in need of no argument whatsoever. 
There are just such men in this present world; 
men whose own wholesome lives do most prac- 
tically argue immortality ; men whose present 
purity and sanity of soul is ever in advance of 
your tedious arguments and evidences of immor- 
tality; men who by living straight and good- 
heartedly here and now have most actively, right 
joyously, quite unconsciously argued their endless 
right to a place in the eternal good-heart of 
things. 

And, it would seem, a diseased and cowardly 
soul argues equally against its immortality — 
most practically and frightfully against its right 
to an eternal part in the everlasting good soul 
of the world. His unfitness, his unreadiness for 
life should cause you to pause a moment in your 
monotonous recital of arguments from the books ; 
to pause at least long enough to pity him in his 
very sorry case. For despite your scholastic ac- 
count of his soul as entity is his real soul not quite 
evidently dying? already declining under some 
incurable disease of the spirit? Can all your 
arguments and evidences put together again 
what the real and devilish powers of the world 
have wrought asunder? Surely, his is a case not 
for deliberation but for action, not for meta- 
physical meditations, but for the ministrations of 
a very vigorous and very healing, very invisible 
power of Life, if such there be in this world or 
the next. 



100 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

The thing is, not to bandy words ; not to stop 
to consider any theory of the soul as impeccable 
or inviolable; not to leave it to its own devices 
because it is an invincible entity, an indestructible 
substance, a spiritual atom, or God knows what; 
but in the presence of the practical, gruesome, ac- 
complished fact of a soul rotting in its sin-disease 
to take active measures to relieve and release it, 
whatever it is, into the free and open air of God's 
health-giving universe. I imagine — I say it in 
all reverence and silent solemnness of spirit — I 
presume to believe that this is in truth God's 
method: surely he allows entities, substances and 
suchlike, if suchlike there be, to care for them- 
selves whilst his great, humane spirit is engaged 
most actively, painfully and lovingly in the guid- 
ing toward eternity, in the healing toward san- 
ity in perpetuity, of living souls like you and me, 
and that sinner over there. 

It takes a sinner in fact to try to the depths 
the power and patience and hopefulness of a 
living God. He lays a perpetual claim upon the 
invisible humanity of the larger Life. In his 
desperate case, seemingly diseased in spirit beyond 
recovery, with the horrifying consciousness that 
the very bottom is dropping out of his soul, sin- 
fainting, such a man never claims immortality 
as his inalienable right on the ground of your 
arguments, on the ground of your " entity " 
(whatever that may be). He feels, if he have a 
single drop of manhood kfi in the poor sclerotic 



LIFE EVERLASTING 101 

veins of his soul his pathetic unfitness and un- 
readiness for any eternal place in the divine order 
of things. He seems to know, as by a last rem- 
nant of the still unconquerable instinct of man- 
hood in him, that for him a future life is no neces- 
sity and indeed no strictly reasonable hope. 
Thus with no preposterous arguments and with 
no cowardly evidences he enters the great Beyond. 
I think he fronts there no mechanically redeem- 
ing God-entity, no silent, eternal and icy-cold 
perfection, but just the eternally patient and 
hopeful spirit of a living God, the Hving and pas- 
sionately hot Life of God, God alive! God al- 
mighty ! God all human ! Down with you, poor 
diseased soul! Prostrate before God! God! 
God! Then, up with you, rich restored soul! 
Leap for joy before God! God! God! For 
there in the great Beyond, before your very soul- 
eyes is — no ghostly company of dancing enti- 
ties ; there is the army of God ! Be patient, peni- 
tent, strong in your own soul's manhood! And 
after the furlough granted you by the great Cap- 
tain, once you are whole and strong and brave 
again, you too shall join the company of your 
peers and fight! fight! fight! 

The gift and responsibility of eternal Life; 
the miracle of rebirth ever making good earth's 
dead losses ; God's and your own everlasting com- 
bat with sin; — that's what argues immortality. 
In this manner of arguing even a sinner may lay 
a perpetual claim upon the patient and hopeful, 



102 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

unbroken courage and eternal Life of God. Ar- 
gue like a man then! Live like a man now and 
then! 

IV 

There is a certain unheroism in the doctrine of 
the souPs necessary immortality and ultimate sal- 
vation. As if, do what you may or please, the 
soul is a fixed Thing and must needs gravitate 
toward a fixed state of salvation! Advisedly I 
say gravitate, not levitate; for one would most 
assuredly have to go down^ very perceptibly down 
below the level of the world's fair fighting-ground 
to be saved in any such secure case as that. Men 
are never so desperately wounded in God's battles 
that they want to go down to this soldier's home 
kind of heaven. They may have to go there for 
a season in God's providence but not for God's 
eternity — for which God be thanked! Their 
release from heaven onto the borderland of hell, 
the firing line of Life, they shall have, if only 
they want it; want it deep, deep down in the 
humane souls of them ! After the horrible gashes 
of thy fighting finitude have in safe measure 
healed over, thou brave Man! thou shalt fight 
again somehow, and on some rough field of being ; 
shalt fight again, do thou but deeply need and 
want such extension of thy time of enlistment in 
God's great invisible army of choice Noblemen! 

But shame upon you, thou coward soul ! to ac- 
cept salvation and an everlasting furlough! not 
to win increasing Joy through the accomplish- 



LIFE EVERLASTING 103 

ments of an heroic life but to claim a soldier's 
home-heaven as a certified demand upon a me- 
chanically and thoughtlessly beneficent deity ; or, 
it may be, to find satisfaction in the physical acci- 
dent of divine birth and settle down in princely 
splendour and stagnating idleness through an 
eternity with no suflicient life in you to suffer 
even ennm; to find joy in the unmerited gifts 
from a God of undiscriminating " saving grace " 
rather than in generous and undemanding co- 
operation with a God of inexorable righteousness 
and unsearchable Manhood! Shame, I say. 
There is in all this a fatal taint of unfaithful- 
ness,^ unheroism, pusillanimity! The heaven it 
describes is in very truth a coward's paradise! 
the resort of the world's nerveless degenerates! 
In this world here and now we do not call such 
seekers after rest heroes or true princes; we call 
them tramps, dependents, defectives, cowards! 
We try to be patient with them, but we don't 
celebrate them. What to them is heaven we call, 
more plainly, " poor-houses." 

And a poor house heaven would be in such a 
case: a place where for very idleness men would 
cultivate in selfish and unprosperous lives an 
abundant harvest of private and personal sins for 
the reaping of their grasping and ungenerous 
hands. There is, I repeat, something unheroic 
and debilitating in this self-assured optimism 
prevalent just now among men of a certain kind, 
— nay, of a very uncertain, wavering kind, if the 



104 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

truth be told; in this sense of personal security; 
in this abuse, I should call it, of manhood; this 
abuse of the instruments of divine love and jus- 
tice; in this obliging of God to be patient and 
hopeful because, forsooth, his human instruments 
are entities, indestructible and doomed to be saved. 
Have you ever known a person on earth who not 
theoretically but practically asserted this neces- 
sary goodness of his soul? who here in this world 
claimed to have attained that high level of in- 
violable purity ? who advertised himself as " sanc- 
tified " (as the theologic phrase has it)? If so, 
you know what I mean in this point. Such a 
sanctified person is next to impossible; would he 
were wholly so ! 

V 

I have said that the soul as an entity is unreal, 
or in any case inconsiderable " What, then, is 
the soul? " you may reasonably ask. I'm afraid 
one cannot say definitely; for, happily, the soul 
is nothing definite. A man's soul is his real self, 
we may say. That leaves you margin enough 
for endless speculations! But what I practi- 
cally mean is that a man's genuine soul is identi- 
cal with his relative character, the fugitive vices 
and virtues, the moving passions and joys of his 
daily rounds of being; in short, his present self. 
A soul not unlike a stone is what it does. Let 
the active quahties of a stone be depressed through 
constant abrasion by the hard places clrcumpress- 
ing it and it becomes less and less. Even so your 



LIFE EVERLASTING 105 

soul if it be disintegrated by faithless, unresist- 
ing contact with the storms and cataracts of life, 
is just so far gone. You see it is a question of 
resistance and fitness, the ability to overcome and 
profit by the world's every anstoss, as Fichte 
would say. Nay, more ; tested naturally the stone 
is more enduring than a human soul. Of all na- 
ture's products a spiritual complex — and that's 
what every living soul is : not a simple entity but 
a complex of vital impulses, passions, instincts, 
resistances and attractions — of all the creatures 
nature has begotten a spiritual complex, a human 
soul, I say, is the least stable. How hardly a 
child of man grows to maturity of self -conscious- 
ness and self -responsibility and how painfully 
after such high consummation your son of man 
persists therein the hard-headed criminologist and 
alienist are constantly reminding us in their re- 
ports. No ; for mere brute longevity give me a 
stone! It is much steadier than a man. The 
everlasting, lapidic hills are always celebrated in 
contrast with the vanities of human life. If you 
will seriously consider this point you will see that 
the soul of man along with its perfect God, as 
metaphysically construed, is in the stone's case: 
a lapidic soul-entity, a lapidic deity ; dull, heavy, 
ponderous, stiff, stark, staring, stony-dead. 
They, the metaphysician and his God, are dead 
and have therefore gone to their everlasting rest. 
I suppose that is an important consideration. 
But they are dead, most gruesomely, palpably 



106 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

petrified. Ask such a petrified God for the bread 
of life and what can he give you, what can you 
expect of Aim, save a stone of a soul? an immortal 
fossil of a man ? — immortal, right enough, but, 
as I have contended, quite petrified, of frozen 
splendor ; a monstrous mummy of a one-time good 
life? a dreadful exhibit of perfect Death? 

I say all this perhaps a bit sharply not that 
anyone may be put to confusion; — that would 
be a sorry spectacle; but that anyone who 
will see clearly, may observe what the soul genu- 
inely is; no considerable entity but an organisniy 
quite really living or dying in the process of be- 
ing; its life like every other of nature's children 
chastened and lawed by certain necessary condi- 
tions of life ; a life which is even now generating 
enduring powers, everlasting adaptabilities, per- 
petual graces. Yet a little while and your soul, 
thus armed and fortified, will open the door of 
death to enter — who knows what-then? May we 
not in one deep sense ask, " Who cares what- 
then?" In no braggart sense, that is; bragga- 
docio is the vice of a weak soul a;id deceives no one 
except perhaps itself. I mean, " Who cares what- 
then? " in a thoroughly considerate sense. Who 
is there engaged now and here most earnestly in 
exercising his soul's energies ; in being to his full 
stature; in feeling rushing through the veins of 
his spirit the vast energies of the world-spirit's 
own Life ; — who in such a case can possibly care 
what-then? The demands and joys of the 



LIFE EVERLASTING 107 

this-now are tingling in every drop of this pres- 
ent energy. It is no time for studied reflections 
upon entities, future destinies and such things ; it 
is a time to live, and having lived, to enter in ful- 
ness of manhood, to enter — who cares what- 
then? We have tasted of this-now and found it 
strong, nerve-steadying, — ay, splendid ! Can 
that-then be any less ? 

Life begets life, life itself gives assurance of 
life. When Theodore Parker said in praying to 
his God, " I am conscious of my immortality,'' 
his consciousness was not thrown out wantonly 
into a settled, petrified, certified eternity; rather 
he felt within him a living Real, like molten steel, 
a living soul durable and changeable, lovable and 
livable throughout eternity and a day. By its 
exuberance of growing and fitting life the soul of 
such a man may even go the metaphysician one 
better; an entity exists throughout an eternity 
only, throughout a meagre eternity ; a living soul 
conscious of its immortality would live for eter- 
nity and then a day. 

VI 

Enter the stacks of some great library and ex- 
amine the literature on the soul's origin, function 
and destiny. You will be amazed to find a mass 
of works dealing with the soul's destiny out of 
all conscionable proportion to the mass treating 
of the soul's origin. Indeed the latter consider- 
ation you will not meet at all until you come to 



108 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

the books of modem psychophysics. In this con- 
cern of the soul the scholars have been conjectural 
rather than soberly scientific in their investiga- 
tions. The result was inevitable : the farther they 
pushed their conjectures into the future the re- 
moter their conclusions were from the living thing 
they set out to save. Take eternity and try to 
mean by it a literally endless succession of years ; 
then smatter a human soul over all these years. 
What result do you get? Precisely the result of 
the metaphysician : a ghastly, petrified ghost of a 
soul, a shade in very literal truth. No human 
being can stand the stain of eternity all at once; 
one must have breathing-space, endless tvme in 
which to be preparing for eternity. And, as I 
see it, God is in similar case : he, if he be human — 
and if he be not human, who cares what-then.? 
— God, no more than we, can stand the pressure 
and pull of an eternity all at once. Our destiny 
and his is not to be eternal but to become eternal, 
not to endure the perfect agony of a clearly per- 
ceived and eternally unbearable reality-all-at-once 
but to manfully wrest from an inchoate, un- 
formed, potential eternity all that we may need 
for the day's work and purposes; all that, no 
more, no less ! 

Men, as I have hinted, would have seen this 
more clearly if they had examined the soul in the 
light of its origin. For I must insist stubbornly 
that it did have an origin in time. The soul of 
each of us here on this planet came to be at about 



LIFE EVERLASTING 109 

the age of two years. By soul I now most obvi- 
ously mean no entity, (if it be that, who cares 
what-then?) but that living self I have spoken of; 
that conscious organism of self-impulses, pas- 
sions, instincts; that self-possessiori'y I suppose 
one might say. This living soul came to be: 
that's the point. Now, if you inquire what it was 
in this plastic source of its being, you will get a 
vivid sense of what it ought ta be in its destiny, its 
outcome. 

What is it in its origin? Well, I have just said 
that it is no ghost of a soul; no petrified, fixed, 
monstrous thing, but an impulsive, spontaneous, 
limpid soul of life with all the passion and zest 
and growing masterfulness of a little child. If 
you don't know what that is, friend, then God 
pity you ! your case is hopeless. The thing is, to 
keep your soul in eternity just what it most natu- 
rally is in childhood — full of life ; replete with 
passionate sorrows and joys ; instinct with action ; 
its being's currents flowing ever deeper and 
broader ; by all means fluent, limpid, fresh ; mov- 
ing at first ripplingly and at last — if you must 
grow old — majestically on toward God only 
knows what precious and shoreless ocean of being. 

Or do€s God know toward what shore ? I hope 
not. For did he know all this full well, did his 
insight cover the depths of an infinitely full ocean 
of being, then he would be a great, silent, im- 
perturbable Dead Sea into which our little streams 
of a day are innocently pouring. Rather let him 



110 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

be the great tumbling, thundering, living ocean- 
waves! Rather let him come actively and con- 
sciously to join and further and refresh us as we 
in our deepest channels of being open out to meet 
him ; — in those broadest and deepest channels, I 
say, where we are nearest that silent, shoreless 
ocean in which we and he live and move and have 
our being. 

The figure is imperfect enough: perhaps the 
imagery of a great undercurrent spring of life 
would have fitted better. But you will under- 
stand me in any case to mean this : originally j and 
God grant forever! your soul consists in just this 
exuberant meeting of the natural, necessary con- 
ditions of life; in just this tumbling, romping, 
thundering, cutting-vn to the world-ground ! Re- 
move that ground condition of life; the anstoss^ 
the shock of getting born again and again; the- 
orize away the powers that tend to defeat ; con- 
sider that your channel is eternally established 
by God and that your only necessity is to flow 
nicely and peaceably therein with never a bit of 
coarse-grained evil to be washed away, never so 
much as a speck of putrefaction to be radically 
cleansed away! Why ! that would remove life 
itself! Such a channel of life would have in it 
no slightest smack of reality from its source to 
its mouth ! 

I can see the souPs case in no other light. A 
real soul is no ghost of a thing that I can imag- 
ine. It is a thing in its destiny true to its on- 



LIFE EVERLASTING 111 

gin, not seeking to destroy its life's impulses, 
passions and instincts but aiming to compress 
these into ever better order; to channel them more 
and more deeply, letting them grow strong, noble, 
virile, even as God, the universal Life, the world's 
soul, is growing stronger, viriler, nobler with the 
on-rolling, in-cutting centuries. 

O! of* course your incurable rationalist will 
pounce upon and riddle all this beyond aU human 
recognition. He will make my words to mean 
that when I really mean this. You can depend 
upon it he will not understand either me or my 
words. His case is as hopeless as — my own ! 
Still I must attempt one more statement of this 
thing I do most solemnly hold for true: a living 
God in his becoming perfection is no eternal and 
compulsory, no instantaneous and spectrally con- 
scious entity of goodness ; but a persuasive and 
tender, spontaneous and youthful, yet solemn and 
commanding spirit of Life — himself living or 
dying daily in the growth or decay of the souls 
of us, his human kind. In us he came to be, 
through us he remains to be seen, in us it doth 
not yet appear what he shall be. We through 
him and he through us are eternal, — provided we 
and he meet the condition of life ! provided we and 
h^overcome ! provided we and he do continuously 
master the great universe's an^toss, do meet mas- 
terfully the great world's every shock of disas- 
ter, defeat, sorrow and disgrace ! provided we and 
he do gain the victory ! In any other case what- 



112 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

soever, we and he, being perishable in our origin, 
will surely die the death, will surely subside into 
the great, the very amorphous, the very cosmic, 
formless Beast whence we and he arose. And 
what-then? — the unutterable Silence and Fatu- 
ity of a metaphysical eternity will set in. Much 
thus depends upon you, my comrade, and much 
upon you, my Comrade ! 

vn 

There was a game we used to play, as chil- 
dren. It was called the " wishing-game." It 
was a zestful, royal, Uvely game, perennially 
stimulating and gratifying. To play it we re- 
quired only a " fairy." Thereby we were per- 
mitted to make wishes — not one " stingy " wish 
merely but as many as we wished. I seem to re- 
member however that the game was conditioned 
and somewhat solemnized at one point: we must 
always wish for something noble, of high degree ; 
we must want to be great Kings or Queens, great 
leaders of men in all ways of simplicity, found- 
ers of happy families, defenders of homes, and 
anything else that was good and great and holy. 
In these circumstances the wishes were supposed 
to " come true.'' 

Well, we used to play thus, as children. Even 
now I play the game sometimes with two little 
children of my own heart ; -r-even now some- 
times, when alone, with the great God of my 
heart! Wish for what you want, now or here- 



LIFE EVERLASTING 113 

after, of all that is noble, vital, princely, manly ! 
And somehow out from the invisible, fairlylike 
being of God's own great and noble humanity it 
will come true now or hereafter! That's the 
game. 

As children, we did believe in the fairy of our 
imaginary game. As grown-ups do we, dare we, 
believe in the God of our Game of Life? the 
great God of our spiritual imagination? the 
mysterious Presence round about us ready for 
every motion of our human lives? a Presence 
whose whole soul is presented for the asking? 
Dare we believe in him? I ask. In manhood's 
Fairy God? 

It is a simple question to ask : " Do you believe 
in God? " Men of modem mind, as I have so 
often remarked, are apt to reply : " Why, of 
course; certainly I believe in God." But I don't 
mean that. Any fool can believe in the God 
you are thinking of when you say that. " Why 
of course I believe in God ; " as much as to say 
^' Why of course the sun will rise to-morrow : 
but what time of day is it now^ you condemned 
man? " 

Once more: Do you belive in God? in him not 
at all as a matter of course but in him in a 
practical, playful, childish way ? Do you believe 
in him thus even though men before they really 
know the awful depth of what you mean will spit 
scorn in the face of your passionate utterance, 
reviling you in your very personal and very con- 



114 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

fidential experience of him you call God-Man, 
calling you all manner of galling and patronizing 
names, ridiculing you as a new and latest brand 
of passionate egotist, a sort of harmless, spir- 
itual libertine? Do you believe that God-Man 
is ? — isy I say, right here, right now, right pres- 
ent, right human? 

Well, I imagine, you are not quite so sure of 
that. But so surely as you do not believe just 
that, just exactly that, no less, you do not fully 
experience God. You are bowing and scraping 
before a great monstrous world-idol; — a con- 
venient idol, too ; for he can't enter your count- 
ing-house and your home to shame your very in- 
tolerable practices there. Well, that world-idol 
will grind you to pieces in the end. He is a God- 
of-course, a Brute-Energy, no more eternal by 
nature nor by natural right than a Beast-of- 
course grunting and pufBng in his universal wal- 
low! He will grind you back into star-dust, I 
tell you! That is his destiny and yours, too, 
along with him. Just so surely and relentlessly 
as Fate, your God-of-course is dying, disin- 
tegrating, being abolished, returning to the 
pompous, stiff, petrified, dead inanity he set out 
from! Go along with him, if you will: you be- 
lieve in him of course! 

But the better course, the better way, as I see 
it, would be to conjoin your energies, your man- 
hoods, with the more romantic, fairy-like, ex- 
uberantly childlike Energy I now and henceforth 



LIFE EVERLASTING 115 

call God, — not your God-of-course but an in- 
visible God whom it requires vision to see and a 
mighty will to follow; a Reality-of-God not so 
obvious as your God-of-course but a Life ever 
pressing on toward mastery and invisible being 
just as surely and steadily as Matter, the king- 
dom of your beastly God-of-course, is sinking 
toward death and destruction. Lend your life to 
the larger Life, engage yourself to that in a 
precious eternal alliance — and live forever, for- 
ever! That is the argument, that the condition, 
that the Life. 

Is it not good to live? to live now and then? 

vm 

In this spirit one may honorably enter what is 
called " life after death " — in this life-after-life 
spirit. " What shall we be like ' over there '.'^ " 
you ask. I make answer: we shall be like himz 
then if we are like him now; for we shall see 
him as he is. " Who is this great * I am '? " you 
ask. He is the God of the veiled Face, the God 
of the veiled Manhood. Unveiled, " over there " 
I hope: but veiled from us over here, — hidden 
from us by all our sensualities, stupidities, 
bestialities. But even now you may see his great 
patient, care-worn, brave Face, if you will but 
unveil yourself; your everlasting pure and holy 
self; your soul girt for life's and eternity's bat- 
tles ! just your own homely, splendid, everlasting 
self! — just that is the God of the unveiled, un- 



116 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

searchable human face, — the Face of human life, 
the Face of the universe's Manhood, Man-God, 
God-Man. 

Is it good to live, to live now and then? Then 
unveil, O Man ! Unveil, O God ! to live forever ! 
f orevermore ! forever and a day! 



IV 

PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 

I 

Most men in these latter days have, as they 
put the case, broken themselves of the childish 
habit of prayer and have now ceased to feel its 
magical strength in their lives. Freed from the 
errors and dogmatism of their fathers' faith men 
of the modern mind don't like to pray any more : 
somehow it is so childlike, so primitive, so useless^ 
this customary praying. It is now past believing 
in. 

Does this modem man then disbelieve, say, in 
God? By no means. He believes in God wholly : 
somehow a great energy is working its way out 
in the lives of men. Only a fool can say in his 
mind " There is no God.'' God is phenomenal, 
apparent enough. But as to praying! Who 
can by that alter one least movement, one slight- 
est law or purpose of the Great God of things 
as they have got to he? 

Perhaps some of you, my comrades of the 
open mind, will recall, as do I, the very night 
when the communing impulse called pray-er began 
to decrease within you; when the Presence, the 
mythic Companion of your child- and young 
man-hood, began slipping away from your inner 
hearth-stone. Ah! but that was a sorry night, 
117 



118 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

the night when, no longer able to open your 
grown life sincerely and oj^i^oZ^-souledly to the 
larger Life, you for the first time sought sleep 
in the awful solitude of a prayerless soul. But: 
" Oh, well '^ you say, " that is all over, best for- 
gotten now. Since that dreadful night I seem 
to have fared pretty well as things go in this 
godless world. My life has become more and 
more self-sufiicient, less and less conscious of 
any dependence upon another Power than my- 
self. The meaning and spirit of prayer once the 
source, I grant, of my daily strength and cour- 
age — it somehow no longer sinks deep into my 
soul. Yes, I fare well enough as things go. I 
am no coward, no sniffler, I am a Man, — godless 
to be sure but a Man nonetheless." 

A prayerless, modem society; men with heroic 
souls bereaved of God; all private approaches to 
the great Father-spirit cut off by doubt and 
hesitation ; the soul of God dehumanized, cast out 
from the habitations of men; great God! a 
stranger in the world, finding never a simple and 
natural response to the call of his father-spirit 
in the hearts of his children, — for we are yet his 
children ingrainedly, bone of his bone, flesh of his 
flesh, soul of his soul. Men in their boasted 
knowledge of Nature's unchanging laws have 
turned their faces away from the World-Father. 
Just last night I was reading. a letter from a 
friend of polytechnic education in which he tells 
me that once when things were going very ill with 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 119 

him he was constrained to " swear at " this ac- 
cursed God of physics. This man's science had 
erected in the place of a once living and friendly 
God a monstrous deaf and dumb idol of things 
as they have got to be. It is even so ; the ex- 
perience of a living God is gone in these days 
of superior knowledge and of desolating doubt. 
Perhaps never to return? 

Here is what William James says on the point : 
" Few men of science can pray, I imagine. 
Few can carry on any living commerce with ^ 
* God.' Yet many of us are well aware how much 
freer in many directions and abler our lives would 
be, were such important forms of energizing not 
sealed up." 

n 
" Were such important forms of energizing 
not sealed up " ! Most of my readers will be 
familiar with the impediment of science whereby 
these great springs of human energy have been 
dammed up and prevented from flowing in their 
natural course with the deeper currents of being. 
This modem scepticism of prayer is very unlike 
the scepticism of a generation or so ago. That 
doubted the very existence of God: this on the 
/ contrary oiy^rbelieves in him ! The modern mind 
believes in God tremendously ! Is his great 
being not obvious on all sides, the Great God of 
the countless stars.? Something like sixty billion 
of them, we are told, are subject to this God- 
Power. His energy is present in the world with 



120 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

terrific intensity: release it, if only you could, 
from its potential imprisonment in a single drop 
of water and, once more we are told, you could 
move by this released power all the machinery 
of all the workshops over the civilized world. 
Great is God! Great and monstrous withal! 
" Surely " this late septicism of prayer argues 
" a God of such prowess and majesty is con- 
cerned chiefly in the machinizing of his in- 
finite workshop, in fitting with stars the endless 
expanse of the heavens. Chiefly in that rather 
than in the conserving and cherishing of human 
things like you and me." God only knows how 
many men in these days have caught this vision 
of his awful power, majesty and dignity. But 
I think there are many who have said in their 
hearts " Oh, God, we acknowledge thee, spirit of 
the great world and its heavens. Great is thy 
power, thy majesty how surpassing all our human 
measurements and imaginations ! Great thou art 
beyond all the childish beliefs of our fathers. In 
the rumbling and inexorable rush of thy matchless 
world-work thou canst not hear nor, hearing, 
heed the feeble petitions rising from human lips. 
How ^mall indeed is this human, whirling planet 
among thy sixty odd billion of such." 

Yes; men in these days believe terrifically in 
God, acknowledge their hopeless dependence upon 
him, revere him in his surpassing power, worship 
his majesty. But they have dumbed in conse- 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 121 

quence the great, infinite heart of tenderness and 
love they once imaged in God. They can no 
longer utter the child's cry for help, the simple 
prayer out of a child's daily needs and trials, 
errors and sins. We sink our souls in the great 
on-pushing energy round about us. We hush all 
our human longings for divine companionship 
and stand silent and lonely under the star-strewn 
heavens; looking up in the attitude of prayer, 
it may be, but with lips stiffened and struck 
dumb by the vision of power and dignity there 
above our heads. Even so, in time we forget 
altogether that hour of evening devotion in 
which, as children, we were able to pray to God, 
simply and freely touching the things, the mis- 
takes, disappointments, passions, sins, of the day 
just gone by ;^ praying with a full sense of God's 
Presence; nothing doubting, for was the Pres- 
ence not there, understanding, strengthening, for- 
giving, companioning?^ Yes, he seemed to be 
there then, but not now. Now, the great Father- 
Spirit is dead ! The great Father-Spirit is dead, 
I tell you. Men and women, great pathetic 
hordes of them are standing in the world hope- 
less, powerless, prayerless, dumb, like sheep for- 
sak'cn of their shepherd, mere beasts in the fields 
of God's world. 

And the proof of all this is at hand, is easily 
found out. It needs but a simple question. 
How many of you, comrades of the modern 



122 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

mind, have prayed in the day, or in the year, or 
in what time soever, just gone by? Not many of 
you in these latter days, I think. 

m 

It would be very easy to refute men's argu- 
ments against prayer; it is in fact a pathetic 
fallacy that has led them to doubt God because of 
the very power and being which alone would jus- 
tify faith in him. What boot^ your childish 
belief in God's goodness, sympathy, love and all 
else human, unless God be indeed? unless his 
being be in very truth just what your adult 
science makes it out to be: world-wide, ever- 
present, mindful? Surely God*s bigness does not 
prevent his goodness and love? We would not 
judge a dog in that way. It often happens that 
the larger your dog is, the more watchful and 
affectionate is he toward those he holds in his care. 
Can it be then that this God who grips in his 
care the very dead planets, whose substance holds 
and feels the fall of the tiniest, fluttering sparrow, 
is unmindful, unwatchful of you and me? of you 
and me who best of all the creatures of his world 
can enter into and become a living part of his di- 
vine life? Surely this is the position of those who 
have never actively entered the larger Life, who 
have never worked with God in his world, who do 
not know God in the way of practice, in the way 
of life. \This thing is, not to demonstrate God: 
that is easy enough ! but to prove him ; ^ot to 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 123 

qualify God ponderously but to live him joy- 
ously; not to chart him as he moves in the dis- 
tant heavens but to speak him friendlily as he 
passes in your way of life. 

IV 

Anyway, argument is futile in all such vital 
cases. Let the logicians and metaphysicians 
wrangle with the scientist over this matter of 
praying. My purpose is otherwise. It is 
merely to impress a fact upon you, friend, in 
case you have come tojSiis modern mind's prayer-lj 
j less belief in Godj the man who knows God only 
as external prowess does not really know him. 
You would know God, as he genuinely and 
really is, or perhaps ought to be? as you mant 
him to be? as you hape he is in that unseen soul 
of him beneath all his visible, earthly and heav- 
enly powers? Then you must mythologize and 
humanize God! You must feel the great in- 
visible powers of the universe concentrated upon 
and in you, God connected in some most vital and 
inward way with the daily deeds and nightly 
aspirations of your human life. All argument 
aside then! The simple fact is thatfno man canj 
put away from himself this in some sort childlike/ 
sense of a God's friendly presence in his owri 
working life without losing in time his very be- 
lief in God. \ On this we must be clear: an ex- 
temal, prayerless thought of God, though it be 
in fact never so knowing, is unutterably inferior 



124 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

to a practical, prayerful, mystic belief in him. 
It is an amazing phenomenon in human history, 
the attempt of metaphysic and theologic science 
to keep alive in the great ocean of being a God 
around whose soul they have hung like mill-stones 
all their weighty arguments and ponderous in- 
finitudes. The mythologists, as I have hinted, 
the humanists, the religionists of humanity, have 
shown a superior instinct in their experience of 
God as Man, or of Man as God (whichever you 
prefer). In any case they have preserved fthe i 
God of real human life; a God who lives andi 
loves in the region of human being ; in whom his > 
awful infinitudes, omniscience, omnipotence, om- ) 
nipresence and such, are not methaphysic but I 
practical, not even infinite if by that you mean ; 
donCy but rather finite and active, once more, in | 
the habitations and souls of men; TvumiaTt^ in 
shorty 

V 

After all these wise old metaphysicians and 
doctors of sacred theology are not really expert 
in divinity. Those rather are expert, as I take 
it, who have discovered God to men, who in some 
very real sense have actually seen God face to 
face, as Man to man, as Friend to friend. 

In a word those hnow God most immediately 
and intimately who in saintliless or in sinfulness 
\ have tapped the very sources of his living being. ^ 
All other knowledge of That we call God is 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 125 

mediate and inferential. In truth\ divinity is not 
so much a matter of knowledge as of friendship:! 
we infer the friendliness of our life's closest com- 
panion, say, the fatherliness of our father, from 
external marks and gifts, until that solemn 
moment when through some act of unwonted 
faithfulness or unfaithfulness on our part we 
come to feel overwhelmingly the eternal spirit 
of love out of which through the years all these 
gifts and expressions of love have poured forth. 
Then do we really know, and yet not rightly 
know but rather sense^ the deeps of our friend, 
our father. It is so withjfscientific and theologic 
knowledge of God: it is in the main external, 
inferential, doctoral^ There is a plenty of 
scientists and philosophers who live in an out- 
wardly friendly relation with the universal energy 
or spirit they condescend to call God : such a God 
is universely prolific! a splendid provider! full 
of rich gifts, unconsciously bestowed! But this 

fextemal friendship with God becomes internal 
and remains an eternal demand in that soul only 
which, having completed its world-wide account 
of God's powers and beneficences, has at last re- 
ceived this world-wide spirit of God within the 
sacred precincts of its own most intimate hopes 

j^nd longings and aspirations^^ I have known a 
few such scientific and yet intimate commun- 
icants with God : one of them loves a little child ; 
another grieves for a life removed by sudden and 



ia6 EELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

tragic death from his hearth-stone; another met 
God when on his way with his once brilliant son 
to a neighboring mad-house. 
p^The God of the hearth-stone, God of the 
world-home! He is God indeed; the inward 
source of all human patience, hopefulness, love, 
righteousness, the exhaustless soul of all human 
courage and wisdomf The God who cares! 
whose manna-machine does, it is true, incessantly 
pour down food for the body from the heavens 
above — infer God from that, you men of know- 
ing temper ! but whose soul of humanity is pour- 
ing forth here in the homes of men such gifts to 
the soul as courage, hardihood, tenderness. Man- 
hood — become God in that^ you men of mystic 
temper ! 

The God who cares! He it is who may and 
must be prayed to, ^ 

May be prayed to, for (he is above all else a 
humane spirit, is God.J His world-soul may thus 
touch ours, his Kfe enter into and renew ours, 
his purposes becom^one and whole in ours, his 
Life live in ours. ' Place your human against 
his human, interfuse your life with his; share 
with him your shame and your sin, your strength 
and your joy, your goods and your evil; speak 
him friendlily as his great world-spirit passes 
your way, I say.] Pray ! And, see, your God al- 
mighty, your inferential infinitudes, will become 
a living, friendly reality. Henceforth the blow 
that falls on you falls on him equally; the sin 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 127 

that debases you ruins him equally; the good 
cheer, courage, manliness, self-expression and 
self-offering that enter and dignify your life 
enter equally his and further his own eternal 
Man-impulses and Man-passions. In you! I say, 
— do I perhaps say it too often and too simply? 
for men think you can't talk of God^ther than 
ponderously and pompously — nay, (in you God ^ 
becomes; \in that great humanity that sometimes \ 
shrieks out in the night with the very agony of \ 
its infinite pain in growing, in that Man beyond \ 
yourself, the great God lives and moves and has i 
his being. To this Man-God, though to none | 
other, a man may pray. ) 

And must pray too. See how intimately per- 
sonal, mutual, reciprocal, social, friendly this 
relation of God with man is ! So intimate is it 
that somehow spirit must make known to spirit 
the needs and demands and aspirations of each. 
J Communing of spirit with spirit — and that is 
praying essentially and inwardly — cannot be 
OTi^-sided. J There would be no touch, no feeling, 
no understanding, in that. I know of no more 
presposterous theory of prayer than that which 
affirms that God knows our needs in an eternity 
before ever we felt the same. Preposterous, 
theoretic nofi-sense! Why, my friend, those 
needs didn't even exist, they most certainly were 
not, until you felt them. Once I read an ac- 
count of an old woman, a senile dement, who 
spent her last days ministering to the imaginary 



128 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

wants of a senseless, stuffed doll. She was not 
unlike your God, and you not unlike the limp, 
dumb lump of a doll, my friend, if you press 
your theory of prayer too far! Nay,rGod in. 
his world-old life is still young and spontaneous' 
in his inner springs; he in his exuberant Life 
"rejoices as a strong Man to run a race"; he 
is still growing in humanity, is still in intelligent 
contact with your human Ufej The relation be- 
tween him and you is a live articvlate matter. 

( When you stir he stirs ; when you want, he wants ; 
when you cry, he pauses in his busy way ; when 
you open the flood gates of your soul his in- 
fluence does most actively come/ All this when 
you pray, when you become in some way articu- 
late before God; but not sooner, I think. God 
must and may be prayed to;Lspirit answering 

^ spirit, that is prayer^ 

Let us agree upon any explanation you will 
of this contact between our human and God's 
human spirit. Call it supersensible, telepathic, 
subconscious, or by what term soever you choose. 
Such terms do explain in the right direction: 

I silent, wordless prayer is more efficient than 
prayers from the mouth^ O^Jj don't confuse 
the principle of communion. \ Round about and | 
within each of us is a great^ indubitable, in- 1 
domitable Soul, a consciously, humanly sensitive | 
Spirit, conserving us with all its might, guiding I 
us with all its power, speaking our spirits with j 
the infinite tenderness and pathos of its own 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 129 

/ soul of triumphing righteousness. And there 
I is only one way in which the human soul may 
i inwardly acknowledge and know that sustaining 
power, consciously follow that friendly leader- 
ship, inwardly hear the divine call: the way of 
wordless prayer, j Wordless but not senseless, 
wordless but not inarticulate is this prayer of 
the full, human life. In his quiet hours of 
praying thus the devout man's soul is infinitely 
expressive: he lays bare before the humane soul 
of God, as he cannot before any other living 
soul, the eternal wants of his spirit and feels a 
Presence passing that way strengthening, com- 
forting, reassuring; persuading him that these 
eternal needs, these untiring aspirations of his 
human soul are infinite, living passions in the 
very soul of God. He and God move together 
in prayer; in prayer he and God face together 
the eternal way.\ 

Don't say then that a man must not pray over 
his daily needs, trials and errors and sins ; for 
whatsoever things concern a man infinitely con- 
cern the God-Man infinitely, too. We stand 
facing a world in which our knowledge is per- 
verted by brute-facts, our lives are altered and 
cultivated in time by the changing seasons of 
a world's progress. We grow and are infinite, 
are majestic, only in that progress, in that push- 
ing-forth into being, in that entering into an 
unformed and unknown eternity. But the spirit 
of God moves and grows infinite and majestic 



130 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

in that same world and in that same way of prog- 
ress: his spirit knows no more than the great 
world as it now is and is becoming, the great 
infinitely possible world of real life. 

And sol the prayer that asks for more life, 
more light, more strength is to the very soul of 
' God the signal of life, the motion of a new 
birth of spirit within his Life, the opening of a 
new soul to the unending possibilities of becom- 
ing alive. ^ We men must cease to pray for 
trifles as if they were the eternal verities of life ; 
we must consider more and more what are life's 
lasting dignities ; we must yield graciously to the 
life and wisdom of a Great Spirit surrounding 
us, the loving Leader of our lives ; we must learn 
to labor with this larger Life, to practice the 
Presence of the Man in us, the God in him; 
we must believe in the answering love and wis- 
dom of the Whole. Then after this great dis- 
cipline of soul a grown man like you and me 
here may pray to the Spirit of God, (each saying 
in the silence of his soul " I cannot live, I can- 
not be, I cannot work without this gift of thy 
love and. life. More Light! more Life! more 
Love!'* And the answer will come in your life; 
somehow all the conditions of life will become 
gracious and blessed and strong; one's soul of 
prayer will have come to know on earth some- 
thing of the eternal joy of the spirit's own in- 
visible world-home — out there and in here, be- 
yond and beneath all the conditions of beastly 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 131 

time and beastly space. This is the principle 
of prayer: the retirement of the human into the 
divine spirit, the human into the divine Life; 
the call of the undisciplined soul of a man to the 
disciplined yet Hke soul of God. ; 

Really to see^ really to yield to this living 
argument of a larger yet like-minded Life, to be 
unafraid of its Presence, to be unashamed to call 
it " God " and to stand nobly in his Light, to be 
frankly mystic, to pray simply yet in the 
strength of your grown-up manhood — that is 
your supremest vocation, O Man ! " What is God 
that thou are mindful of him? '' you ask. God, 
believe me, is infinitely more than all-mighty, in- 
finitely more than all-wise, infinitely more than 
inrhvmselfy infinitely more than what quahties 
soever your tedious and monstrous science of God 
may picture him to be. God is not divine — not 
in his right arm of avenging power nor yet in 
his perfect mind of fatal knowledge. God is di- 
vine — in that very heart and centre of him, in 
those unconditioned aff*ections where even he, as 
God is! is dependent upon you and me, upon 
our love and faithfulness and strong manhood, 
upon our working with him in his great enter- 
prises of love in the world, laboring with him in 
his world-wide vineyard, home-making with him 
in his great world-home. No ! God is no chief 
artificer — not that chiefly, I mean ; he is no 
wise One merely, seeing all clearly and ordering 
all fatally. (^God is a presence of humanity, a 



132 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

spirit of human strength and humane love like 
you and me, living under all the conditions of 
human trial and affection ; unlike us only in this : 
in his age-long, storm-centered Life he has even 
now gained unspeakably in patience, in courage, 
in hopefulness and in all those splendid infinities 
you and I are staggering and working toward^^ 
It is only in the opening out in prayer of our 
human hearts in that way that his spirit and Life 
of divine bravery and love can enter and chasten, 
strengthen, stir, comfort and protect our littler 
lives. 

VI 

This is the method and spirit, you will find, 
of those who have seen God, the saints and sin- 
ners who have found' him in life's ways. 

As to the saints. Spending their lives from 
beginning to end in simple trustfulness, finding 
God's face as familiar as the stars, his Presence 
as certain as the everlasting hills, these passion- 
ately faithful men spend their days in a kind of 
perpetual communion with God; they fail not 
for a moment to rest confidingly in the larger 
Life; they always feel around about and within 
their human lives the very spirit and presence of 
a living God. How they prize the friendly walk 
with God, this constant turning and looking to 
the Eternal for strength and guidance ! Well, it 
is a very wonderful and convincing sense of God's 
presence; a communion with the Unseen, they 
tell us, so enduring and withal so practically 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 133 

human that all the hard and dark places of the 
world, one is sure somehow, are not eternally 
hard and dark at all: they are just places of 
trial, it may be even unto death, but out of which 
every human soul must eventually escape into the 
light and comfort of God's presence, into the 
larger Life, into the sweet serenity of the 
Father's strong soul. ThiSy because they have 
seen the veiled face of God, they say, and have 
beheld that time-worn divine countenance all 
aglow with human sympathies, all firm and 
patient and hopeful, as if he were determmed 
with a great, divine strength and resolution to 
prevail over all our human destinies, to bless all 
our human lives, to put into our faltering human 
souls something of the force, the resolution, the 
righteousness, the iron-like love of his own un- 
conquerable humanity. J What wonder that they 
are glad and confident, these men of prophetic 
vision and saintly lives ! [ Do they not walk daily 
with a great Companion, an incurably human 
God? ) " ~ ^ 

This is the sort of walk you and I may have 
with God, if only we too will have the courage 
to believe in the ever-present reality of God in 
every place and time of our human life, i Thus 
to know God we must learn — yes, learn, for it 
is not easy at first — to pray, to practice the 
presence of God. /(This is praying, I think: to 
pause in the midst of some very practical, some 
very worldly occupation when perhaps the im^ 



134 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

pulse to hastiness, ungenerosity, dishonesty is up- 
on us, or when some great and lowering passion 
of the inner life is tearing us asunder — to 
pause, I say, and remember that underlying all 
the heat and passion of life there is still the 
great Spirit of the living God. In his friendly, 
mardy presence the narrowing temptation be- 
/ comes so frail,, the grip upon us of passion so 
slight that in t that solemn moment of wordless 
prayerywe find ourselves once more men! strong 
in the consciousness of a larger Life manning 
ours. 

In this wordless prayer, in this simple walk- 
ing with God even in the heat of one's daily 
temptations and passions, in this unconscious 
praying to God from street to street as one 
mingles with the prayerless crowds of men and 
women, in this ever-ready spirit of prayer there 

^is a quality unspeakably enduring and purifying. 

i To practice the presence of God ! How it clears 
one's vision! how it sweetens and deepens one's 
life! how it infuses into one's daily rounds of 
business, of trial and error, of successes and fail- 
ures, a still perpetually chanting joy! In some 
mysterious way — why not by the very spirit of 
a living God in the world-home of men? — this 
man's constant vision is contagious! In all its 
clearness and cleanness and joy that man's sense 
of God catches in the lives and hearts of all his 
fellows: they too feel, they know not why, that 
somehow the world is good, somehow God is! 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 135 

That man, transfigured in the light of a God's 
humane Presence, is apt to draw all men up to 
him. 

I like to think that the great throbbing Life 
round about us is comforted by the presence in its 
world-soul of such faithful sons and daughters. 
Natural parts they are of that larger Life : their 
constant dependence upon, and faithful obedi- 
ence to the deeper currents of the diviner Life 
is as simple and steady as God's own soul of 
goodness and love itself. A perfect, natural 
communion of the human with the divine Life; 
man a faithful reflection of God; God a present 
Companion of man. Even so man discovers 
God, sees him beyond argument and yet beyond 
doubt face to face, Man to man. Friend to friend ; 
an unfaihng vision of divine Manhood, a per- 
fect union of man and God, all life a faithful 
expression of a great God-Man ! Blessed are 
these pure in heart, for they have seen God. 

vn 
As to sinners. For there are those to whom 
the divine-human face of the world's soul is not 
ever present and familiar. They are men 
blinded and deceived in ways of evil, from whom 
the humaner face of the world's self is veiled by 
the shadow of the world's brutalities and mon- 
strosities. The theologians describe such as 
" convicted of sin." The more artistic of these 
sinners have in all ages portrayed hells and devils 



1S6 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

to mar men's more mystic visions of heavens and 
gods. They in their way have sounded being 
as deeply as the saints we were just celebrating. 
Only they have seen things perversely, baldly, 
unmystically. They too have seen a soul of 
things face to face, Man to man. Fiend to fiend. 
There is an oriental vision I once read and 
have not easily forgotten meanwhile. It is the 
vision of a man (Ar^na) who is about to enter 
into a great battle. The outcome of the im- 
pending fray he knows not. It may well mean 
his death. So he prays to his God (Vishnu) 
for a full vision of his divine being, to see his 
god face to face, ere he should die. Then the 
vision comes of a great world-beast: a great 
" swallower of the other gods," " of countless 
forms possessed of many arms, stomachs, mouths, 
and eyes on all sides," " having " indeed " a 
mouth like a blazing fire, and heating the uni- 
verse with his radiance," " of wonderful and ter- 
rible form," with " groups of gods entering into 
him," " with a gaping mouth and with large 
blazing eyes," revealing a mouth of " terrible, 
fearful and horrific jaws resembling the fire of 
destruction " with human heads " smashed " and 
" stuck in the spaces between the teeth ; " men 
like moths entering a blazing fire are entering 
his mouth " to their destruction ; " " swallowing 
all these people " this God of horrific mien is 
" licking them over and over again from all sides 
with blazing mouths ; " a god whose " fierce 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 137 

splendors filling the whole universe with their 
effulgence are heating it " ; god of " death," the 
" destroyer of worlds." 

A god of death and destruction indeed! the 
image of lowered bestial manhood; the very 
antithesis in all regards of the Man-God vision 
of the more saintly souls of the world. Such a 
visigii of God with a cosmic hell as his environ- 
ment is but(the enlarged image of many a man's 
inner soul\ a human soul of fierce and self -de- 
stroying impulses glimpsed on a world-wide scale ; 
man creating a God-Beast in his own image ; man 
meeting God face to face, Man to man, Fiend to 
fiend, as I have said. 

This, or some other of no less horrific mien is 
the vision encountered sooner or later by men 
who become depressed by the powers of evil in 
the world. And such powers are plentiful 
enough, God knows: disease; anger; unbroth- 
erliness; idiocy; senility; concupiscence; dis- 
honesty in high places ; men losing their souls 
through abuses of the body and of the spirit; 
every man's hand, it would seem, turned against 
his own soul and that of his brother ; unmanhood 
and bestiality, in short. 

Men, or their sons and daughters, not in- 
frequently go mad in these paths of unrighteous- 
ness. Ignorance, over-work, folly, soul-abuse, 
these are all forms of immorality; they aU are 
forms of unwisdom. To avoid them requires not 
that a man be educated in the schools; they are 



138 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

•violations merely of a man's natural instincts, his 
mother-wit, his mother-wisdom in truth. And 
they have their reward in the modem visions of a 
psychic hell. Recently I had a letter from an 
alienist who tells me that practically every case 
of insanity is brought on by the sin or folly of 
the deranged soul himself or of some of his fore- 
bears. 

Folly and sin, these, just as surely as wisdom 
and righteousness, have their reward: sinners in- 
wardly beget their hell and its fiend just as surely 
as saints inwardly catch the vision of heaven and 
its god. Men's lives pray more practically than 
their words, their secret thoughts than their open 
professions. As a man thinketh in his heart so 
is he ; and even so is his god, too. 

Say what you will, you idealists and a&sthetes, 
you have no closet deep enough to conceal in 
every part the skeleton of the world's arch- 
fiend. The Devil is no anatomical monstrosity, I 
grant. I agree with you in your animadversions 
against the crude forms in which the primitive 
man's fears clothed the powers of darkness of the 
world. Disembody the devil, by all means ! But 
he remains, — invisible, psychic, powerful ; indeed 
in all his unseen powers closely akin to the god of 
your idealistic thought. " Strike, strike, in the 
name of God." Work against these desolating 
powers, these evils, these sins. Throttle and ut- 
terly destroy this invisible world-fiend! Else his 
poison will spread and spread, from father to son, 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 139 

from individual to society, from generation to 
generation, from planet to planet till the death- 
power thereof shall enter and madden and destroy 
the very soul of God ! 

I walked one day in a beautiful way. God 
seemed there. My heart sang a song in major 
key. Almost I was persuaded to become an ideal- 
ist of absolute faith. Evil seemed so powerless, 
so unreal, so remote withal. But I met an idiot 
in the way ! His deformed, — nay, his destroyed 
— manhood, was not " good in the making." He 
was hell. 

But sinners have been known to escape this hell, 
to replace with a vision of God the horrific fea- 
tures of this invisible world-fiend. They have 
spent indeed long dreary years in prayerless doubt 
of the very existence of any eternal courage and 
goodness, and pity and love in the world. But 
one day they have roused themselves with a mighty 
oath ! and have struck out against these evil pow- 
ers and visions ! — against them have opposed the 
simple powers of their own inward Manhood! 
Man against devil then! And, behold, the evil 
things have vanished like the howling winds of 
the night and the lonely fighter has found himself 
a very god. 

A very god, I say. Fighting there in the dark- 
ness was praying in its effect. That sinner-man 
in his triumphant Manliness finds in himself a 
heyond'hiTTiself. He places his poor frightened^ 
maddened self in the larger and deeper currents 



140 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

of God's self, the world's soul; and finds it with 
him. He prays. Thus praying in action he 
gropes his way back into the light of the divine 
face of things. And he sees this goodly face of 
God with a new and deeper insight bom of his 
awful experience of evil and darkness and mad- 
ness in the world; he sees something of infinite 
pity, something of divine patience and sorrow, 
something of infinite humanity in the time-worn 
and world-weary face of his God. Praying thus, 
he sees the God-life all seared and marred and 
scarred with the battles and wounds of life; he 
sees the great strong soul of God all sensitive and 
quivering with the wants and hopes and struggles 
of humanity's life. Finding this way of prayer 
he cries, full and glad and triumphant : " I be- 
hold within, I am^ the infinite person and heart of 
God. O God, I come, I come." And of a cer- 
tainty God meets him there in the darkness face 
to face, as Man to man, as Friend to friend. 

vm 

As Friend to friend, that is the point. In 
hours of failure, in times of soul-weariness after 
hard and defeated struggle against the influence 
of the evil powers in his inner life, then even a 
grown man like you and me may pray, may rest 
his soul in the comprehending soul of the world, 
the infinite Father of all earth's humaner religions. 
So we shall recover courage and strength for the 
morrow. And then we must once more arise ! and 



PRAYER AND THE MODERN MIND 141 

build ! A practice of prayer that needs no artic- 
ulate utterance : it sees directly the manly, friendly 
person of God, its own beyond-self, its own larger 
Life, the great universe's communism with hu- 
manity. 

As Man to man, that is the point. In hours 
of strong and vigorous manhood, but when the 
way of life is not clear, when your man's deepest 
searching of his inner soul brings no light and 
you know not whither stretches the onward road 
nor where the region of the larger Life; then 
again this way of prayer is opened. You pray, 
• — or call it what you will. You do naturally 
open your life to the larger Life and — somehow 
the light, the guidance, the vision perfect, clear, 
luimistakable comes straightway: you know, 
nay, you are most actually in the deep currents 
of the universe's own righteousness in this hour, 
most fittingly called, of prayer. 

Pray then to God! unafraid and unashamed, 
pray ! Speak to the larger life as naturally and 
as simply as you would talk to yourself. Pray- 
ing is that essentially, God is chiefly just that: 
your deeper self, your larger Life. He is you! 
Man alive, God is just you! in the making; you! 
in possession of all the powers of the world and 
all the experience of the ages. Possess yourself 
then ! possess yourself of all these beyond-human 
powers and experiences and go praying and 
chanting on your way of righteous manhood! 
By praying so a strong man may gain all the 



142 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

marvelaus insights of the larger Life, the God- 
Life. 

Praying in such wise does secure all the riches 
of God's own being and love. The God of hu- 
man hfe, the great Man-God by a perfect in- 
stinct, a superlative — may I say, telepathic ? — 
sensitiveness to all things human, does indeed feel 
the prayers of men who stand in, most literally i/n 
his Presence girt, ready to receive and obey the 
commands of this living and friendly and right- 
eous God. 



V 

THE UNKNOWN GOD 



The supremest vocation of the preacher and 
priest in all ages and in all religions has been 
to reveal to their people the unknown God under- 
lying all their speculations and aspirations, to 
charge with vitality the region of a man's doubts 
and unholy superstitions. It is profoundly im- 
pressive to reflect upon the great scriptures of 
men, the documents in which the ages' geniuses 
have sought to lift the veil of mystery which sur- 
rounds the human Hf e. One is moved not so much 
by the rudeness or, as the case may be, the pathet- 
ic cleverness with which the human soul has solved 
its mysteries ; he is challenged rather by the star- 
tling fact itself that on this borderland of mystery 
where there is no knowledge to guide the human 
life the soul of man has been most heroically 
alive to the eternal verities, most faithfully and 
splendidly aware of the divine life. It would seem 
to be the peculiar mystery of this unknowable 
God surrounding the human spheres that, while 
he defeats with his everlasting " No '' all the con- 
jectures and hypotheses of logical men, yet with 
his everlasting " Yes " he receives and confirms 
all the advances and beliefs of the childlike mind. 
The same God who seems to stiffen and threaten 
143 



144* RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

under the assaults of men's conceits of knowledge 
is tenderly attentive to the unconscious wants of 
the very animals and children of the world. The 
same God who seems to move relentlessly and ma- 
jestically in the heavens above dwells in innocency 
and simplicity within the spirits of the pure in 
heart. A profound mystery, this! It is surely 
in the region of God's unseen being that we shall 
find the point of reconciliation between the mys- 
tery of God's unthinkable immensity and the mys- 
tery of his childlike simplicity. 

We must sooner or later face consciously and 
honorably this region of eternal mystery which 
has surrounded men in all ages, and within which 
they have erected their altars to unknown gods. 
It is in a most profound degree a region of mys- 
tery and its god in a very real sense a Great Un- 
known. In the infinite depths out beyond the 
most distant fixed star there is nothing but mys- 
tery ! deep within your inmost soul, in the infinite 
soul-abyss underlying all your daily trials and 
passions, nothing but mystery I 

n 

One day I witnessed a strange experiment in the 
laboratory of an expert chemist. He warned me 
away from a spot near which he was preparing 
his experiment, but where my inquiring eye could 
see nothing. Yet he assured me that was the 
most real and active point in the entire region of 
his strange experiment. Then he grasped a wire 



THE UNKNOWN GOD 145 

of the toughest known metal and thrust it into 
this region, and instantly it coiled and curled and 
melted into nothmg. And nowadays, when I ob- 
serve men thrusting their hard and monstrous 
definitions into the region of God's great, active, 
unseen white-hot life, I seem to see their inquisi- 
tive definitions coiling and twisting and melting 
into sheer nothmg. 

Nor is this the complaint of a rude i^^belief in 
the Unseen. Rather is it the protest of a tender 
mysticism which, blinded by the intense light from 
the invisible countenance of God, henceforth 
shrinks from a too familiar approach to his great 
white throne. " Canst thou by searching find out 
God? '' " O Lord, I believe: help thou mine un- 
belief,'' " Though he slay me, yet will I trust 
him," " To think that God is as we can think him 
to be is blasphemy ", — these and ten thousand 
similar cries bespeak a soul which has faced the 
eternal mystery of God and has returned to life 
unconceited and undishonored ; for it does not 
claim to have seen when its eyes were blinded, nor 
to have heard when its ears were deafened, nor to 
have understood when its judgment was paralyzed 
by its direct, instant contact with this infinitely 
mysterious and unknown God. 

in 
I wonder if we have not touched here the secret 
of losing one's life in order to find it in God. 
There are many things men were wont to sacrifice 



146 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

on their altars to an unknown God — their fruits, 
their beasts, their sons, daughters, and wives, their 
own bodies to be burned. But such burnt offer- 
ings somehow failed to satisfy the needs of their 
own worshipping souls, nor yet the invisible de- 
mands of their unknown divinity. Then men 
came to a nearer insight into the longings of their 
own souls and into the needs of the divine life. 
God requires of a man only that he shall love 
mercy, do justice, and walk humbly with his God; 
that he sell all that he has and give to the poor; 
a sacrificing of one's wealth and ambitions, a 
placing upon the altar an utterly broken spirit 
and contrite heart. But now as a last and inex- 
haustible demand of the Great God Beyond it 
seems that he who would know God must sacrifice 
on the altar the very instruments of knowledge 
itself, his very intelligence, his very soul, his very 
self! so majestic and so infinitely real are the pur- 
poses and longings of the divine life. Without 
conceit of knowledge, without dishonor of mind, 
without pollution of soul, a man must face the 
Unknown Eternal and cry : " Oh, thou great 
Unknown, accept now my supreme sacrifice. 
Longing above all else to know thee, I yet destroy 
my instruments of knowing. In this supreme 
hour of self-sacrifice, not knowing thee, I yet 
yield my life to thine eternity in the simple 
faith that thou art, and with the insatiable demand 
that thou shalt be good and brave and beautiful. 
Soul of my soul, bless now my life.'' And in this 



THE UNKNOWN GOD 147 

hour of supreme soul-sacrifice the life of God, the 
infinite Good Will, reveals itself in the human life 
with an overmastering intensity: one is lifted 
above all his natural longings, above all his daily 
ends, beyond his practical, knowing self into the 
invisible home of God. Out beyond the most dis- 
tant star there is nothing, only mystery, nothing 
only God! Deep within your own soul-abyss 
there is nothing, only mystery, nothing only God ! 

IV 

A man's soul thus tested and tempered by the 
invisible fire on his altar to an unknown God, no 
longer withers and shrinks when extended in the 
direction of the hidden God of the ages. Rather 
does such a soul grow and glow with* something 
of the everlasting enthusiasm and divine health of 
God's own unseen life. His poor purposes in 
some mysterious way gain all the reality and dig- 
nity of the divine life, his hopes somehow contrib- 
ute to and are strengthened by the divine hope, 
his courage by direct ways partakes of the perfect 
courage with which God himself faces unafraid 
his own eternal life. All that one can ask of 
purity of heart and in honesty of mind comes 
straightway and unasked out of the heart and 
mind of God into the heart and mind of that man. 
God appears as the infinite fulfiller of all our own 
high wishes, the satisfier of all our eternal de- 
mands. 

There is a subtle argument in a recent play, 



148 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

entitled " The Servant in the House,'' a meaning 
which, I imagine, exceeds the conscious intention 
of the author himself. In an early scene the 
Christ spirit is represented as hovering about a 
young girl, Mary by name, whose tender and pure 
life is just ripening into conscious womanhood. 
The spirit of Christ urges Mary to wish hard for 
the one thing her life most needs. She replies 
naturally that she does not believe in such a game 
of wishing. The Christ replies that she must 
wish and must believe that her wish will come true. 
The sole condition of the wishing game is that 
her wish shall go deep, deep down into her life. 
In such deep, soul-searching wishing nothing is 
too good to be true. The soul's disinterested 
demands upon reality find their fulfilment in very 
truth. 

Mary agrees to play this game of wishing. 
Then for the first time in her young life she 
searches for the thing her soul most needs. Once 
more the Christ spirit broods over her, and there 
grows upon her the sense that her life requires 
most of all a father who shall be good and brave 
and beautiful. And so she wishes, she demands 
outright, that her life shall receive this new dimen- 
sion of father-love, that her deep need shall be 
fulfilled in a living father who should be in truth 
brave and good and beautiful. Then the scene 
changes, and the form of struggling fatherhood 
appears before her. His face is unclean, his hair 
unkempt, and his body all knotted and gnarled 



THE UNKNOWN GOD 149 

with the toils of life. For years his life has 
staggered under a secret sorrow: he has been in 
danger of losing his soul in the agony of his un- 
spoken loneliness. But the one eternal, infinite 
thing in his being is his love of his little child 
and his longing for her presence in his life. 
This unknown man is in reality Mary's father. 
She gazes a while into his seemingly unlovely, 
untrue, unbrave face and discovers his secret grief, 
his wordless longing for his lost child. She com- 
forts him and then tells him of her own wish for 
a father who should be good and true and beauti- 
ful. Instantly the father spirit rises and responds 
to this image of goodness, bravery, and beauty 
as he appears in his child's eye of faith. In the 
sunlight of this child's high expectation even his 
fatherliness mysteriously ripens into a deeper 
dignity. Finally after the scene has changed, the 
father spirit having resolved to sacrifice his own 
soul's love and to face his life bravely, manfully, 
and even without his child's answering presence 
and love, Mary, gazing into the marred and sub- 
dued face of this mighty, unknown man, recog- 
nizes the noble father of her soul-searching wish, 
a Man strong and brave and beautiful. 

Thus, perhaps unconsciously, does the genius of 
this strong drama reach the point of contact be- 
tween the unknown God and the child of his inner 
longing. There is this answering of soul to soul 
in the relationship of God and man. The unseen 
God of the Great Beyond answers from the depths 



160 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

within our souls every noble wish, every honorable 
demand of our human life. The divine character 
which defies aD definition is as sensitive and 
plastic as the soul of a little child. Our human- 
ity and God's divinity, our sonship and his father- 
liness are in the deepest and most literal sense 
mutual. The invisible God, putting forever be- 
hind himself the perfect peace and silence of eter- 
nity, takes on our struggling and clamorous 
humanity, responds patiently, gladly, to all our 
upward and outward reaching passions. And, 
in thus finding and furthering you and me, the 
unknown God finds and furthers his own living 
soul. Henceforth for all eternity the highest 
reach of our sonship touches and moves to the 
quick the deeps of his f atherliness. Each advance 
we make in the direction of purity and love is met 
and furthered by an answering wave of divine 
character and of divine love from within the in- 
visible soul of the unknown God. Henceforth 
and for all time you and I fulfil a place in the 
universal heart and life of the unknown divinity : 
each of us by his faithfulness may soothe or by 
his unfaithfulness may intensify the great void of 
life aching within the divine being. There is 
within the unsearchable depths of the world's soul 
a divine uneasiness of spirit: it cannot rest until 
you and I and all men recognize in that unseen 
soul beneath and beyond the time-worn face of 
God all that is brave and good and beautiful. 



THE UNKNOWN GOD 161 



The evangelical theology argues that the 
Father requires a Son to fulfil his nature. In this 
it builds more wisely than it knows. The sons of 
God complete his nature in a most literal and in- 
timate sense. In relieving the exquisite, undefined 
pain of unrequited love in the divine heart of 
things we men add to the Father a new dimension 
of conscious purpose, a purpose of human right- 
eousness which henceforth transcends all the 
physical world-creating impulses of Grod's cosmic 
hfe. The hour of your soul sacrifice upon the 
altar of this unknown God of cosmos is the hour 
of the Father's soul realization; the place where 
your soul finds rest in God is the place where 
God's soul finds rest in you; the time when your 
spirit is lost in God's immensity is the time when 
God's simplicity is found in you. It is the hour 
and place of perfect atonement and peace; the 
condition under which the unknown God, invisible 
in his power and character, faces with and 
through you all the desert places even beyond the 
stars and all the waste places in human souls, and 
causes them to blossom and fructify through all 
time. The mystery which surrounds the world 
and human life is God in all simplicity, in all 
mightiness, in all expectancy: it is all alive with 
the invisible, divine character and love — man and 
God mutually conscious each in the other. The 
great beyond is filled with God's invisible patience. 



152 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

the untiring hopefulness, the glad braveness, the 
perfect honorableness and righteousness of spirit 
in which the divine life inhabits eternity. 

Beyond the most distant star there is nothing 
save mystery and God and eternity! Withm the 
sotd-abysses of hum/m life^ underlymg all your 
daily trials and passions amd sins nothing save 
mystery and God amd eternity! 



VI 

THE INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 

I 

There is one conviction of the inner life to 
which we men of religion must commit our spirits 
absolutely and unreservedly. It is the sense of 
God's real presence in our human lives. Men 
have defined the spirit of God in a thousand 
ways. A man of science seeks an adequate ex- 
pression of God in terms of physical majesty: 
God is the infinite energy present in unthinkable 
intensity in the great teeming cosmos round 
about us. The man of philosophy expresses 
God in terms of spiritual majesty: God is infinite 
Spirit interpenetrating and transfiguring the ma- 
chine we call the world. The man of sorrow 
finds God a spirit acquainted with grief; the 
man of joy, a spirit of infinite gladness; the man 
discouraged by the hard pressure of life upon 
him finds in God a spirit of infinite restfulness 
and unconquerable confidence ; the man of unholy 
passion attains some day in God a life of perfect 
purity ; the man of impatient spirit, a life of in- 
finite patience. And so the tender life of God 
unfolds itself in infinite ways in the lives of us 
human beings. 



153 



164 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

n 

Now, it is the genuineness^ the reality and cer- 
tainty of this divine presence in our human life 
that I want to make clear in these moments of 
our meditation together. I have known many 
wavering men who have felt this world-old call 
of the divine life in their souls but who have been 
either too timid or too perplexed to yield to its 
eternal pressure upon their lives. In their timid- 
ity of spirit they have seemed to themselves to 
be unworthy of the divine presence, unable to 
live every moment unashamed in the sight of 
God. Or they have been too perplexed by the 
rudeness and crudeness of the world of men round 
about them to beHeve that humanity is indeed 
and in truth the garment of a great inner di- 
vinity. 

Yet this timidity and confusion of spirit al- 
ways fade away in the light of a great experi- 
ence of God. In meditation upon the presence 
of God in the human race, in meditation upon 
the saintly men and women who all through the 
ages have trusted in God and were not ashamed, 
in meditation upon the burning, commanding 
spirit of God discovered by those who have stood 
upon mounts of vision far above men and worlds 
of men — one cannot doubt that God is ! Our 
timidity becomes childish, our .perplexity merely 
a defect of our poor, finite humanity. One may 
at last overcome this childishness and finiteness 



INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 155 

of his humanity and himself stand forth in the 
light of the ages, stand forth hke a man! In 
this great experience of the infinite spirit of God 
a man discovers for the first time and for all 
eternity that his own human manhood is everlast- 
ingly justified and dignified by the infinite and 
invisible Manhood of God. 

We ought to be very quiet and reverent and 
solemn now, for here we stand in the presence 
of one of the everlasting mysteries of God. 
Here we may learn in silent meditation the way 
of the great overbrooding spirit of God. It is 
not the way of childish timidities nor of hopeless 
perplexities of spirit. We must learn, sooner or 
later, that the great spirit of God cannot yield 
itself wholly to our human life, cannot wholly 
put on the perfect humanity for which the in- 
finite heart of God is eternally crying out until 
the human spirit at whose portals the divine spirit 
is ever waiting calls out openly, honestly and 
manfully " O God, if thou be, enter my life and 
make it wholly thine ; make it infinitely pure, in- 
finitely alive to that life of triumphant righteous- 
ness and love in which alone thy divine life can 
realize its infinite humanity." Lay bare your 
spirit before this living God, put aside the very 
sandals of your soul and stand naked in spirit 
and unashamed in the presence of God and the 
great spirit of God will surround and invade your 
being with an almost terrifying certainty. The 
timidity and perplexity of your earlier search 



156 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

for God will remain only as the memory and 
symbol of your own imperfect humanity. You 
will have learned for all eternity the invisible, 
unconquerable humanity of God. 

This, I say, is the eternal mystery of the di- 
vine life: that in the very hour when the human 
soul gives itself up absolutely to the awful in- 
jSnity of God's being it comes to know something 
of the infinite humanity of God. In abandoning 
one's self wholly to the being of God one finds 
that in an infinitely mysterious way the divine 
life is human, that the very inmost being of God 
is reaching out infinitely toward all that is deep- 
est and intensest and noblest in the life we call 
human. The soul's communion with God when 
the spirit of God unobstructed by human hesita- 
tions and withdrawals completely invades our hu- 
man life — it is the hour when we see our human 
life in its infinite dimensions^ the hour when we 
know the invisible humanity of God. 

Too often men have supposed that the point 
of contact between humanity and God is reached 
by the throwing out of many, magnificent 
phrases, such as omniscience, omnipotence, omni- 
presence and the like, when all along the human 
spirit has stood ready and eager to believe in these 
immense realities of God if only they could be 
realized in our poor, human life. Just how is the 
infinite power, the infinite wisdom, the infinite 
presence of God to move within the narrow con- 



INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 157 

fines of our finite humanity? Do not the very 
terms of our deification of God estrange him 
from the trials and errors and sorrows of our hu- 
man hves? 

In these quivering questions of poor humanity 
I always seem to hear the sad voice of a human 
soul crying out for the living God. " Oh, that 
I could find God; the living God! I am weary 
of men's faint descriptions of God. I want God, 
a patient and hopeful God, a Man-God, whose in- 
finite being is all alive with the hopes and passions 
of our human life, whose power and presence are 
engaged with men in the way of righteousness 
and love, whose infinite being is daily, hourly put- 
ting on the garments of Humanity." 

I talked the other day with a noble man who 
is spending the strong years of his life working 
in city missions. He is trying to redeem human 
life at just those points where the divine life is 
threatened by apparently incurable diseases of sin. 
He told me of a man whom he had seen arise and 
fall again and again in a frightful struggle with 
a degrading appetite of the soul that was assail- 
ing him. And my friend said to me " I tell you, 
as I watched the man, and saw the divine fire ap- 
pear and then fade away, then reappear and 
again fade away, each reappearance of the spirit 
finding him a little nearer the infinite light of 
God, as I watched the awful struggle and de- 
termination of the spirit of God in this fighting. 



168 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

human soul — I tell you I could have worshipped 
the man, I could have fallen on my knees and 
worshipped.'' 

Well, don't you see it was God in the Man? 
If ever there is a God, it is the God who has 
dedicated his whole eternal life to this struggle 
of humanity to become divine. The hour in 
which your human life takes on divinity, the hour 
in which once for all eternity you resolve in 
your inmost soul to live always in the presence 
of an infinite being of holiness and love, the hour 
in which your human life becomes triumphantly 
divine is just the hour in which the divine life 
becomes triumphantly human. 

ni 

And genuinely to believe in this invisible hu- 
manity of God brings into the human life a won- 
derful sense of perfect communion with God. 
Do you find the conditions of life hard? They 
are infinitely harder for God, my friend. Is 
your spirit clogged by the mass of duties which 
you wearily face with the dawn of each new day ? 
Ah, think of the world-weariness of God, and be 
still! Is a man's soul marred by some vice of 
his inner life? What pollutes man pollutes God. 
I am looking always for that prophet of the 
spirit of God who shall burn this world-old truth 
into the souls of men: God is in very deed bone 
of their bone, flesh of their flesh, spirit of their 



INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 159 

spirit; God is in truth closer to our human life 
than breathing, nearer than hands and feet; all 
the plague-spots in human hfe, all the houses of 
sin, all the hours of solitary unfaithfulness and 
dishonor, are places and times where the precious 
spirit of God is being debased and ruined for that 
which is not holy and righteous. Oh! the spirit 
of man must hide itself in shame, must cry out 
in heart-broken penitence when once it knows 
the humiliation and suffering its faithlessness has 
brought into the sensitive spirit of God. 

Does the glory of man lie in triumphing over 
these lowering conditions of life? So is it with 
God. You need not suppose that the perfection 
of God is for him an eternal, unworked-for 
beauty of soul. He who thinks he sees in God 
this placid, unmoved and solitary perfection has 
placed a poor, human soul in the high place of 
God — a human soul whose face is unmarred by 
life's imperfections, only because it has al- 
ways been protected from the winds that blow 
and the storms that wreck. But the spirit of 
God has faced the storms and winds of an eter- 
nity and is still triumphing over a whole world 
of sins and pains and sorrows. Who then sees 
the perfection of God sees in infinite number and 
in infinite directions the lines of Character^ the 
invisible marks of a divine Humanity, whose nobil- 
ity, whose perfection consists in the simple yet 
unthinkable sinlessness of the divine being: a ^^ 



160 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

vine life all full of our human impulses and pas- 
sions, yet never once in all eternity yielding the 
divine ideal to that which is base and mean. 



IV 

Of this invisible humanity of God there is no 
visible sign or symbol. Men who ignobly turn 
from the simple, daily duties and cares of life 
and cry " Lord, show us a sign," " Lord, Lord 
what shall we do to be saved '' are not ready for 
the beatific vision. There is no luxury in this 
experience of God. In this vision there is the 
peace that passeth understanding but there is 
in it no ravishing luxury of spirit. The vision 
is for him who gladly accepts its blessed chal- 
lenges. It is for him who finds joy only in the 
way of righteousness, whose spirit leaps out with 
a great joy into an eternity of life and duty; 
for him who knows not what the everlasting years 
may bring of joy or of sorrow into his eternal 
spirit but who will not doubt that his is God's 
way, his life God's life, his endless humanity the 
ever patient and hopeful divinity of God. It is 
for the man who can find in the ever human and 
understanding spirit of God the power to recover 
from some staggering blow of life, the will to 
feel the tender, wholesome spirit of divine life 
struggling and conquering day by day in the life 
of humanity. The vision is . for him who for 
God's sake sees every living creature transfigured 
in this light of the ages, who sees God fighting in 



INVISIBLE HUMANITY OF GOD 161 

the very face of human idiocy and sin, who is 
able to see in the desolate ruins of human institu- 
tions and of human Uves something of the infinite 
Borrow of God, something of the marred and de- 
feated spirit of the Father of mankind. 

And yet, who save God himself may cry " De- 
feated!" Is it not just the mystery of this di- 
vine life that it breathes forth an invisible and in- 
fallible faith in our human lives, that in the very 
moment when human priests have sadly con- 
demned a child of God to eternal death, the 
greater, wiser, patienter spirit of God is there 
endlessly confident, infinitely faithful, pronounc- 
ing its everlasting " no ; " reviving the fainting 
spirit; crooning over the sin-sodden human soul; 
soothing it to sleep, it may be — but to a sleep 
which shall not end in death ; a sleep, rather, from 
which the human spirit shall awaken refreshed 
and re-strengthened to re-enter the life of the 
world and the life of God? Once more, the mys- 
tery of God's invisible humanity, the unseen real- 
ity of a divine life which is genuinely, under- 
standingly all that our human life from day to 
day is seeking and hoping to be, a divine life in 
which weariness, impatience and hopelessness are 
ever present, seeking to defeat the infinitudes sur- 
rounding our human life, and yet a spirit of God 
which, if weary never rests, if impatient never 
strikes, if hopeless never dies. 



VII 

THE PRESENT GOD 

I 

As the theme of our evening's meditation, I 
have chosen to consider with you the romance 
of God's invisible humanity, the motion of his 
unseen spirit on-pressing in the souls of men. 
This experience of God can be measured only 
by the instrument of meditation: Silence must 
underly and master the words with which we shall 
seek to sound this invisible humanity I call God, 
The persistent presence of divinity in the race 
of men! From the first man with his vision of 
his own invisibly divine image in burning bush 
and flaming star to the last man with his grasp 
of God's human spirit regnant and watchful over 
the star-strewn heavens and the men-strewn earth 
— how consciously, patiently, triumphantly has 
God's spirit pressed in upon the opening souls of 
men! God is. The invisible spirit of all hu- 
manity, God is! I know not what may be in 
the infinite reaches of unvisited space and un- 
transpired time. I only know that by some com- 
manding passion of his expanseless being, by some 
tender impulse of his placeless soul a God-Man 
has come to earth to dwell within men. He has 
come to dwell evermore in the lives of men, mak- 
ing his own their trials and errors, their successes 

162 



THE PRESENT GOD 163 

and joys, their goodness and loving kindness. 
There is some strange, imperative persuasiveness 
in this faith that men of all times and climes have 
kept in the living presence of God's image in 
their souls. It is a direct perception of faith 
which only a suicidal scepticism has ever defeated. 
As men's sense of the brutal energy round about 
them has grown, their spirits have but gained 
just so much in trustful confidence: this ma- 
jestic God of the heavens by the virtue of his 
very power is all the more reliably concerned for 
their life, all the more joyful in the times of their 
gladness, the more sad in the hours of their sor- 
row, the more tenderly forgiving in the places of 
their sin, the more patient in the days of their 
weakness and unfaithfulness. 

n 

What matters it then that the earliest concern 
of the divine life was with the blind organizing 
of the great universe round about men? I dare 
say the human passions and purposes of the uni- 
versal Life lay for countless ages concealed and 
dormant within creation's soul. But now! 
Who can contemplate the drama of the divine 
life in the enlarging souls of men and yet miss 
the vision of a creative Life all revealed and all 
a-quiver with human power? Why, the faith of 
men alone in their own eternal value, their vision 
of themselves under the form of an endless di- 
vinity must have drawn a response from the all- 



164? RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

feeling spirit: the universal Life cannot have 
missed these throbs of divinity outpouring from 
the newborn souls of men. How hardly could 
the great drama of divine faith have enacted it- 
self in this world-home of men, had not the im- 
pulses of men's righteousness and love become 
at once the deepest concern in the heart and being 
of God himself ! Every act of human righteous- 
ness, each impulse of human tenderness and af- 
fection in the world-homes of men are intimations 
of an unspeakable harmony aimed at hour by 
hour, world by world, in the heart and being of 
the universal life of humanity, the God of man- 
kind. Human temptations, trials, sins are but 
signs of a passionate Life eternally present yet 
everlastingly mastered in the divine being, the in- 
visible Father-spirit of men. 

What if it were not even so? Suppose this 
drama of the divine in human life were, as some 
of the positivists would have us believe, enacting 
itself on a human stage alone ; that this on-push- 
ing human life were all there is of divinity in the 
world-life? Would not this divinity triumph 
none the less? Would it not grow silently, and 
magically extend its sobering, transforming pas- 
sion of divine Hfe to all men in all generations? 
Would not men under the pressure of the di- 
vinity within acquit themselves as responsible and 
infallible gods? Nay, would not this perfect pas- 
sion of us human gods transpierce, chasten and 
soften the very energies of the heavens? The 



THE PRESENT GOD 165 

complaint of the positivist Is that men have relied 
too much upon the God of their magic and super- 
stition. Meanwhile the pathetic fallacy of pos- 
itivism is that in its turn it relies too little upon 
the Man of its humanitarian vision. In him is 
the very quintessence of divine energy and pas- 
sion. His belief in the regnancy over all things 
of righteousness and love is inviolable. No crea- 
ture is so frail or debased, and no creature so 
monstrous as not to respond to the touch of un- 
affected goodness, faithfulness and purity in the 
world. A single pin-point of divinity, a solitary 
impulse of natural love in any place or time of 
the world's being must infallibly master with its 
divine control all the awful and terrifying powers 
of the universal life, bringing all heavens and all 
men within the light and strength of its con- 
stant life. 

Just so, I believe, the divine life has kept pace 
with the life within our human souls, inviting, 
guiding and furthering all our essays in divinity. 
Of every enlargement of the spirits of men, of 
every deepening experience in which the race of 
men has come into a profounder sense of God's 
presence and into a surer and more intimate com- 
munion with his world-old Life — we may rest 
assured that the great spirit of God deep down in 
the souls of men and far out on the horizon of 
the world's vast being, the great heart of God 
has known; his invisible spirit has felt and has 
poured in its answering life and love. Ah, this 



166 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

unseen, incomparable humanity of God! How 
silently and patiently it throbs out its life in this 
world-home of men. That is God alive! — the 
God who has lived and grown in all humanity, 
the God who lives and grows in you and in me 
this night and eternally, the great Companion of 
our hours of world-loneliness, the great Physician 
of our nights of soul-sickness, the great God of 
our souls. 

When will men cease measuring God in cubits? 
When will we cease esteeming the divine life by 
the sheer heights and abysses of the world's be- 
ing? When will men cease worshipping *' His 
Majesty " ? When shall we escape this last form 
of idolatry, this worshipping of a telescopic im- 
age of the unknown God? Then, shall we 
awaken and arise to the true height and tender- 
ness of God's invisible being ! 

in 
There is only one tragedy in life from which 
the human soul seems unable to recover, only one 
derangement of life's natural harmony so fear- 
some that the broken spirit deliberates longingly 
upon death eternal. It is the frightful loneli- 
ness of the soul that has lost faith in the com- 
panioning love of the divine life and sees only 
blindness and cruelty in the heart of the sur- 
rounding world-life. Facing this fearful vision 
of an untrustworthy universal Life that sets it 
about, the human soul finds the very majesty that 



THE PRESENT GOD 167 

once commanded its confidence an instrument of 
torment: calamity impends; one blow, and this 
human life is staggering under an intolerable 
weight of sorrow and soul-death. 

One night my path crossed that of a lonely 
woman of the world. I learned that on that 
very night she harboured in her soul a longing 
to express her life in a way of sin. Her life 
cried out against this desecration of her child- 
hood's innocency and sweet chastity. Yet she 
would offer all upon the altar of her generous 
human love. As one whose life is defeated save 
for its poor, human pulse-beats she told me that 
her soul would no longer pray. She believed in 
God; yes, and trembled. The Great Father was 
dead and her own soul had burned itself on his 
pyre until death. There seemed to her hence- 
forth more of companionship and tenderness in 
the life of sinful affection she contemplated than 
in the whole being of him she called God, the 
distant Creator of her ancestral traditions. As 
I turned silently and solemnly away leaving her 
there in the night, a soHtary figure, type of all 
the lonely, wandering souls in this great world, I 
knew she was beyond my human help, lost to the 
arguments of men. I knew that only the infi- 
nitely human, patient and hopeful spirit of God 
could ever recall her soul to his great world- 
home. 

Some years later I crossed the path of another 
spirit driven to the verge of madness by this 



168 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

same loss of faith in the humane presence of 
God. She was alone and friendless in the world. 
In her loneliness of spirit she sought the compan- 
ionship of God but could not find him. A 
woman of refinement with no impulses to tempo- 
rary sin she was able by her culture to find in God 
all the qualities of divinity save just this one note 
of infinite humanity. Power, majesty, law, 
righteousness — all these she acknowledged as 
belonging in the world being; but in all these 
she found no response to her trembling, human 
needs, no real presence to companion her in the 
lonely struggles of her wakeful night-watches. 
For long she had been desperately struggling 
against the impulse to give up her search for the 
divine companionship and to end her life in a 
last, violent protest against the lovelessness of the 
circumpressing power she called God. 

The exquisite pain of utter soul-loneliness, 
when all forms, human and divine, appear as they 
were phantasmal and unreal ! What wonder that 
the broken soul seeks relief in the painlessness of 
endless death? It is the tragedy of a soul that 
has lost for a while humanity's age-long vision 
of God's own mystic humanity. Is it strange 
that the tearing away from a human spirit of the 
silent soul of its humanity, the painfully accu- 
mulated belief of all human ages in God's sur- 
passing humanity, should so lacerate and maim 
that soul that in death it seeks release from the 
horrible aching at its broken heart? It is as if 



THE PRESENT GOD 169 

the very soul of humanity had met a sudden and 
tragic death, as if the whole soul of God had 
passed out of this world-home of our human 
life. 

IV 

But there is in all this a divine compensation. 
The loss of faith in God's regnant humanity may 
torture a soul beyond all human endurance. 
And yet passing thus through this valley of soul- 
death the human spirit, sooner or later, now or 
then, will emerge into the sunlight of God's in- 
visible presence — a presence solemnized and 
brightened in infinite degree by the vision of the 
soul's black death. Just so, this faith in God's 
full humanity may in the very hour of deadly 
darkness enter the life of a man and bum in upon 
him a mark of divinity so tender and sensitive 
that no calamity, whether of death or of life, can 
estrange him from God's endless humanities. 
His soul has been touched with a live fire from the 
altar of God's eternal humanity. 

All other ways to God are blind, formal, un- 
conceiving except this way of mystic, practical 
confidence in the spaceless, timeless value of hu- 
man life. God may by external marks reveal 
the whole body of his divinity and yet his in- 
visibly human soul remain unseen. It is this un- 
seen grace of infinite patience, hopefulness and 
human understanding, transforming all God's 
visible, physical energies, that sets him at once 
beyond the range of our physical imagination 



170 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

and yet within the range of our divinely human 
needs. The divine energy of God's invisible hu- 
manity pours through and beyond us as we come 
and go upon our human errands of mercy and 
pity. The divine sorrow, deep yet comprehend- 
ing beyond the limits of our poor human vision 
presses in upon our human souls until round 
about is the perfect peacefulness of the divine 
companionship. This infinite humanity of God 
is not to be proved or measured. His divine hu- 
manity must be touched directly, heart to heart, 
spirit to spirit. We must let our human life with 
its faltering courage, nobility and love be filled 
straightway and abundantly from the divine life 
with its world-wide courage, its world-old no- 
bility and love. 

By no other way can a man arrive at a con- 
viction of God which might not at the very next 
turn in his human life be shaken by one of life's 
mysterious calamities. A thousand cases of real 
life are at hand in every plague-spotted city in 
the world to show you that your dainty demon- 
stration of God blinks the facts. God alive ap- 
pears only to him whose search begins and ends 
in a pure and brave humanity. Let the purity 
and heroism disappear from a man's belief in 
God and he will find himself stolidly worshipping 
the wooden deity of a schoolman. As there is 
only one kind of godlessness, so there is only 
one kind of godliness. The godless man is he 
who, knowing God by all the clever tricks of the 



THE PRESENT GOD 171 

schoolman's trade, no longer keeps faith with the 
righteous humanity of God. The godly man is 
he who without the conceit of knowledge yet has 
kept faith with men, has played the divine game 
of the humanities honorably, tirelessly, unwhim- 
peringly, and who gladly risks his eternal life 
upon the belief that righteousness and love are at 
the heart of things in this world. For insensibly 
this man with his boundless human vision comes 
to practice God's invisible humanity, and in prac- 
ticing this human divinity he learns that the in- 
finite energy of a schoolman's demonstrated God 
is one in substance and in spirit with the divine 
energy that preoccupies all men's meditations 
and leads them in the way of humanity. 

V 

Even so the race of men has learned to risk 
its unseen future upon the belief that its age- 
long vision of an ideal humanity is but the vision 
of the deepest, intensest and noblest passions in 
the very soul of God. I sometimes glimpse this 
vision of humanity's God alive as it appears in 
the midst of the grey cloud of magic and super- 
stition obscuring its gracious features. It is a 
vision of a Man of almightiness and deep wisdom, 
a Man with soul-sinews like brass and iron, his 
form and features all marred and scarred by the 
battles of life, his person all quivering and sen- 
sitive with the pain and suffering and sorrows of 
life. A nobleman he is with power and wisdom 



172 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

checked and controlled in a perfect, constant pa- 
tience and love. In his everlasting arms he bears 
and protects a little child. His great strength 
is held and guarded lest by some accident of his 
very power he should injure and crush this pre- 
cious offspring of his love. His great wisdom is 
bowed down to the level of the simple prattle 
of the child-life he is bearing, his great body 
a-tremble with the joy of the responsive caresses 
with which the child expresses its perfect trust in 
his great being, its perfect dependence upon his 
great heart. With infinite gentleness and ten- 
der firmness he controls and guides the little soul 
struggling and throbbing in his restraining, en- 
circling arms. And as this vision of the divine 
Man grows clearer and clearer in the long course 
of human history, as his features becoming more 
and more majestic and world-wide finally disap- 
pear in the invisible depths of time and space I 
know that this divine Man is God. And the lit- 
tle child is Humanity. 



APPENDIX A 
AN OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM^ 

In a former paper in this Journal the writer 
outlined an hypothesis of absolute experience, 
suggesting here and there a philosophy of " cos- 
mic humanism " which, if worked out, might re- 
deem American philosophy from its present level 
of brute pragmatism and unromantic realism. If 
only the master pragmatists would suppress their 
endless essays in defense and definition of their 
method ! All but the most stiff-necked and unre- 
generate of the younger English-writing philos- 
ophers have long ago adopted the pragmatic 
method, but now stand amazed and dismayed to 
find their masters indulging themselves in the sin 
of elaboration and analysis. This abuse of the 
*' method of definition " is the natural vice of ra- 
tionalism. It were better that the pragmatists 
applied their energies to cultivating the world- 
ground which they have already wrested from 
their hereditary foes. 

The world-ground lies fallow, awaiting the 
hand and will of an expert. Meanwhile it may be 
well to offer, as a stimulant and irritant, an out- 

1 The present paper was read before the American 
Philosophical Association at its meeting in Baltimore, De- 
cember 29-31, 1908, and is reprinted from the Journal of 
Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. VI, 
No. 8. 

173 



174 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

line of the world-view which in his former paper 
the writer described as " cosmic humanism." 



The pragmatist has on his hands a worid- 
ground. What shall he make out of it? There 
is a certain pusillanimity in the present attitude 
of pragmatism. The Promethean boldness of 
rationalism's world-views may well have staggered 
the gods. But now their divine amazement is 
tempered with heavenly mirth by the spectacle of 
a zmZZ-philosophy which yet does not dare to press 
beyond the limits of tedious definition and timid, 
*' on-the-whole '' hypotheses. The history of 
earlier pragmatisms with their homo mensura 
sophisims makes it certain that unless pragmatism 
produces a man who shall measure the very cos- 
mos by himself, the movement begun so potently 
and promisingly a few years ago will prove as 
evanescent as a passing breeze. The pragmatist 
theory has never yet been genuinely tested. Such 
a test would require that the, so far, rather sterile 
pragmatic philosophy were incubated for a while 
in the self -same cosmic matrix wherein the seeds 
of rationalism have hitherto germinated and flour- 
ished. What sort of world-view is the pragmatic 
passion likely to breed if it thus germinates and 
produces its kind on a cosmic scale ? 

Its offspring must be in some sense a worldr 
view. In this matter the pragmatist must recog- 
nize the validity and persistency of the human 



OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 175 

spirit's search for something universal and eter- 
nal. Such a search has indubitably had its func- 
tional value in the growing experience of the race, 
and must, therefore, by the pragmatic test be rec- 
ognized as helping to constitute the living truth. 
What, then, is this perfect passion for universals 
and eternals? Has it the validity of a world- 
forming, world-creating principle? Is it merely 
a passion? Perhaps the passion itself is the one 
universal thing in the world? Does it connect, 
or disconnect, the human from the cosmic ? Is it 
the whimpering and wailing of a soul in an incur- 
able agony of finiteness ? Or is it the terrific will- 
force of an Ubermensch claiming his birthright 
as an aristocrat of the universal life? It may 
well be that a painstaking critique of this old- 
fashioned passion for the eternal and universal 
will expose impulses out of which pragmatism 
itself may organize a view of the world covering 
in principle the whole ground of reality. 

It is certain that, whatever the eternal is. It ia 
not of the nature of ideas. The prime fallacy 
of rationalism arises from its failure to distin- 
guish between the function and the content of an 
eternal impulse. The region in which the self 
acknowledges a universal a priori quality in its 
processes is, as the literature of speculative mysti- 
cism attests, a region of transempirical conscious- 
ness. Wherever the mystic experience has di- 
vulged a content of ideas, these can be shown to 
be preconceptions subconsciously stored away in 



176 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

the mystic's past experience. The pure function 
of consciousness in this transempirical region has 
the imperative, eternal, universal quality just be- 
cause it has no empirical content. It is a pure 
function; its uncertain content, the irreducible 
contradiction between ideas and will, has always 
been regarded by the first-class pessimist as an 
unmitigated evil. 

It can not be affirmed that this pure function 
is inwardly diversified into fourteen forms of ex- 
perience, more or less. Here, again, the evidence 
of speculative mysticism must be trusted. The 
persistent characteristic of the pure mystic ex- 
perience is its spacelessness, timelessness, cause- 
lessness. For some years the writer has experi- 
mented in this mystic region, but has been unable 
to identify in the experience, e. g*., of time, as 
infinite, any quality that distinguishes it from 
space, as infinite. The experience in both cases is 
one of perfect -fluency without ideational content. 
The infinite as well as the infinitesimal space-ex- 
perience begins to " swim " or " shiver " as con- 
sciousness verges upon the abysmal. These are 
the habitual expressions by which my subjects 
have sought to symbolize the perfect fluency of 
the universal and eternal quality in the experience 
of space and time. 

And this which is true of the infinitudes of the 
pure reason is equally true of the infinitudes of 
the practical. Who can uncover say, in wis- 
dom, as infinite, a quality that isolates it from 



OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 177 

goodness, as iniSnite? In the wisdom literature 
from Plato to Emerson these terms of practical 
infinitude are constantly interchanged and inter- 
fused. The eternal goodness is in all points wise : 
the universal wisdom is in all directions good. In 
the mystic experience neither goodness nor wis- 
dom has any ideational content. 

The first principle of cosmic humanism con- 
fronts us here. Whatever may be in detail the 
defects of the world-view herein outlined, this first 
principle I hold to be indefeasible : " infinite " 
when attached to any substantive whatsoever is 
the sign of a contentless, formless function of ex- 
perience. A self-organism, whether human or 
cosmic, in fundamentally finite on the side of its 
empirical content. There is no such thing in 
man or cosmos as an infinite idea. 

The writer's former thesis in cosmic humanism 
is, therefore, not guilty of begging the question 
between pragmatism and rationalism in affirming 
that there must be even in a world-experience a 
region of absolute subconsciousness the infinity of 
which is purely functional. We may grant, with 
philosophers like Leibnitz and Hartmann, the 
hypothesis of an unending, unconscious fecundity 
in the world-ground. The cosmic life may be in 
an incomparable degree teeming with -germinating 
ideas and wills. We are driven, nevertheless, by 
the most fundamental structure of our own or- 
ganisms- of experience to presuppose a formless 
function underlying all these countless half -con- 



178 BELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

sdous impulses, ideas, and passions of the world- 
ground. 

In its first principle cosmic humanism is thus 
aligned with speculative mysticism rather than 
with rationalism. It acknowledges in the world- 
ground an " infinite tendency " rather than a well- 
ordered and self -representative structure of eter- 
nal and universal ideas. 

n 

In its second principle this cosmic application 
of the pragmatic method must transfer to the 
world-ground another ingrained feature of the 
human organism of experience; namely, the in- 
stinctive coordination of blind impulses into a 
consistent organism of vital experience. The 
pure function of consciousness does, in fact, take 
on a living content ; the unconscious does become 
conscious ; the simple fluency of primal conscious- 
ness does become dirempted by warring wills and 
ideas. The prenatal bareness of animal experi- 
ence does fructify with the passing years. The 
cosmic function has evolved a cosmos with the 
passing ages. Now, is this a fructification into 
consciousness of unconscious idea or of uncon- 
scious wiU? 

Here, again, the bias of rationalism must yield 
under the test of experience. This test has al- 
ready shown us that the inmost structure of con- 
sciousness excludes the notion of a divine mind 
full of an infinite number of infinite ideas and 



OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 179 

forms. But rationalism might justly intervene 
at this point with the sentimental contention with 
which throughout its history it has gripped the 
race of men. Putting aside all metaphysical 
claims with respect to the ideas of the eternal and 
universal, this pure sentiment of rationality sim- 
ply claims that at any rate the motives of the 
cosmic life are always ideational rather than im- 
pulsive, calm rather than passionate. The sole 
aim of world-experience is to arrive at an even- 
tual, inner harmony of its germinating ideas, to 
subject all wills to this ideal of consistency and 
smoothness of being. In a word, the prime aim 
of experience is to become reasonable. 

If this final defense of rationalism is an argu- 
ment for the primacy of ideas as against impulses, 
its argument can not claim the support of ex- 
perience. On the contrary, nothing is more cer- 
tain than the primacy of the impulsive phase of 
consciousness. The consciousness of single-celled 
animals is fundamentally motor ; likewise the pre- 
natal consciousness of the higher animals. In 
these two cases no idea whatever (except, perhaps, 
sensations of pressure and warmth) can be present 
in the organism's inner experience; and yet the 
very signs are motor by which the psychologists 
infer that they are conscious at all. Or, again, 
in idiocy and senile dementia, where consciousness 
approaches once more its primal state, the last 
functions that linger above the threshold are not 
ideational, but motor. In " absolute '' idiocjr 



180 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

there still remains a vegetating activity; in de- 
mentia the first functions to disappear or become 
confused are ideational, and in the last stages an 
impulsive activity continues long after it becomes 
only too painfully apparent that all control from 
ideational centers has ceased. 

With scrupulous regard for the structure of 
known organisms of experience, cosmic humanism 
is thus able to take a second step in its construc- 
tion of world-experience. It now conceives that 
experience to be an infinite, totally subconscious 
function whose first steps in world-experience are 
impulsive rather than ideational. No matter how 
persistently a world-soul may in its present con- 
stitution be aiming at inward reasonableness, in 
its beginning it had no idea where or how its 
activity was coming out. Like every other or- 
ganism of experience, it just became, it just grew ! 
In this matter cosmic experience is again com- 
parable with the mystic passion which desires an 
infinite number of things, and yet has no idea 
what these things are. The cosmic passion may 
he etemaly the cosmic idea is inherently temporal. 

m 

These initial impulses arising blindly within 
the formless and fluent infinity of world-con- 
sciousness have undergone coordinating, organiz- 
ing, and hardening processes. In the present 
state of the cosmos the average observer will be 
very reluctant to accept any doctrine of the pres- 



OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 181 

ent plasticity of cosmic stuff. In this matter of 
plasticity the materialist now has the weight of 
evidence in his pan of the scales. The patent 
fact is that, except within very narrow limits in- 
deed, things are not plastic under our processes 
of practical reaction. By overdoing its hypothe- 
sis of the perfect plasticity of the world-ground, 
humanism might easily fall into the pathetic fal- 
lacy of absolute idealism. On the clear ground 
of known experience the humanist may insist (a) 
that the cosmos conceived as world-experience 
must be inwardly a pure function, and (b) that 
in its initial processes of growth it was an incho- 
ate matrix of perfectly plastic yet blind impulses- 
to-be. But it can not be urged on the same 
ground that world-experience in its present state 
is thus blindly and perfectly fluent. World-im- 
pulses, whatever they may be in their inward, 
primeval character, are now outwardly fixed and 
hardened. 

Does, then, the structure of cosmic humanism 
fall to pieces because one can not by taking 
thought pinch ofl^ a cubit of world-stuff and plas- 
ter it on his own head, nor by praying make the 
sun stop in its course.'^ There is a certain merit 
in the criticism of one of pragmatism's doughty 
opponents who declares that the theory is de- 
signed solely for the man who needs to get out 
of a scrape. But the apparent bathos of prag- 
matism at this point arises solely from a failure 
to fit the structure of human experience fidly into 



182 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

the cosmic scheme. For it is true of human ex- 
perience, not only that it has this inner and ini- 
tial plasticity, but also that in its adult form it 
has stiffened and hardened into all sorts of phys- 
ical fixtures. In our own organisms there exist 
innumerable physical processes which are only 
subconsciously felt and are ordinarily wholly un- 
controlled from higher centers. In both its 
phylogenetic and ontogenetic origin this human 
experience began, we may fairly suppose, as a 
plastic feeling-consciousness of the total organ- 
ism: the plastic simplicity of the consciousness 
of the single-celled animal and of the freshly im- 
pregnated fetus is paralleled in each case by the 
plasticity and simplicity of the organism itself. 
But with the inward formation of physical sys- 
tems each discharging a fixed function in the 
evolving organism there proceeded likewise on the 
side of consciousness a certain subconscious hard- 
ening of physical consciousness; e. g.<, feelings 
of visceral massiveness, of joint and muscle 
strains, of physical weight, hardness, and the like. 
Humanism, disabused of any metaphysical 
hypothesis of cosmic plasticity, should propose at 
this point an hypothesis of cosmic, physical sub- 
consciousness. In brief, two postulates are in- 
volved in the fundamental structure of physical 
experience. (1) The physical universe has 
originated not by the fully conscious control of 
some eternal intelligence but, rather, through a 
hardening into objective being of the unconscious, 



OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 188 

organic needs of the impulsively evolving cosmos. 
(2) The physical universe is now felt in the cos- 
mic life as so much pull and strain and dead 
weight.^ In a word, plasticity is no more a char- 
acteristic of cosmic than of human experience. 

IV 

On the other hand, the humanist metaphysic 
need not postulate a cosmic experience less plastic 
than the human. As we have just seen, the phys- 
ical parts of an organism are felt. They are not 
inwardly and radically sundered from the region 
of conscious being ; they are subconscious, but not 
unconscious. Moreover, within certain limits 
physical processes are subject to control from the 
higher motor centers of the organism. Con- 
sciously controlled heart-beating, accelerated or 
depressed circulation of the blood, voluntary bi- 
secting of the viscera, the suggestive therapeutic 
reduction of inflammation in diseased parts, the 
psychic treatment of nervous and chronic diseases 
— these are cases in point. The evidence by no 
means proves the complete plasticity of the human 
organism under conscious control from higher 
centers ; it does indicate, however, that there is in 

1 1 need hardly say that this transcription of physical 
subconsciousness from the human to the cosmic scale 
should not be carried to an anthropomorphic extreme. 
In the cosmic life there are, of course, no visceral feel- 
ings, no muscle and joint strains, and all that. At the 
most the cosmic physique feels in a universal degree the 
intracortical strains and the brain fatigue which assail 
the human life. 



184 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

the conscious organism no inherent inability 
which would prevent the controlling of physical 
processes from volitional centers of the cosmic 
life. 

V 

The foregoing conclusions expose the marrow 
of the divinity within the dry bones of scholas- 
ticism. The genius of the schoolman is revealed 
and exhausted by his search for a necessarily per- 
manent principle underlying and pervading the 
shifting sands of being. And this is the lasting 
passion of all seekers after the universal and 
eternal. 

That such a principle is discoverable we have 
seen. It is in reality not a system of fixed and 
well-ordered concepts, but a pressure of conscious 
activity presupposed in all our processes of ex- 
perience and felt even in the region of our sub- 
conscious, organic life. But the very process of 
analysis which discovers this active principle of 
all experience does not wholly satisfy the scholas- 
tic passion for an eternal whose existence is nee- 
essary. It is conceivable that the function of 
consciousness even on a cosmic scale should cease 
to be active. There are cases of known organ- 
isms wherein the active, organizing principle has 
practically ceased to work. In absolute idiocy 
and coma the organism of experience seems to be 
slipping back into the abyss of totally uncon- 
scious non-being. Either because of a congenital 
poverty of impulses-to-be, or through a fatiguing 



OUTLINE OF COSMIC HUMANISM 185 

of these impulses, conscious activity seems about 
played out. If, now, we apply the norm of hu- 
man to cosmic experience, we may admit the pos- 
sibility of defectiveness and fatigue even in the 
cosmic organism. The persistency of the phys- 
ical universe in the midst of its ceaseless flux of 
being must thus be interpreted partly as the natu- 
ral healthiness of a great cosmic animal ^ and 
partly as the conscious resistance of cosmic 
energy to the deranging forces of mental disease.^ 
The real existence of universal principles or laws 
is, therefore, to be regarded not as necessary, but 
rather as the achievement of a partly conscious 
and partly subconscious will-to-be in the cosmic 
Ufe. 

VI 

It remains only to ward off a possible misun- 
derstanding of the foregoing analysis of the 
world's absolutely subconscious matrix by ex- 
plaining that this discussion of the " infinite " 
has no explicit reference to the tender infinitudes 
of religious experience. To affirm that the abso- 
lutely subconscious has in itself a hlind character 

1 A large part of the living truth is undoubtedly ex- 
pressed in the cosmic animism of Greek culture. See 
Plato's description of the world-soul as a "perfect ani- 
mal," "Timaeus," 31. Cf, Aristotle: "Deity is an animal 
that is everlasting and most excellent in nature. . . . 
This constitutes the very essence of God," " Metaphysics," 
Book XI., 6. 

2 Such resistance appears to fail, as we have seen, on 
the human plane in cases of idiocy and senile dementia 
and on the stellar plane in cases of " dying " comets. 



186 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

which, as blind and unconscious, is strictly sub- 
moral, or to consider that this subconscious world- 
life has arrived at and is now consciously working 
out in its voluntary centers a pergonal charactery 
or to submit the ground on which religious ex- 
perience may justify its antagonism to positivism 
in claiming that this personal character is cosmic 
and not merely human — these questions the 
writer hopes to discuss at some future time in a 
paper dealing with " The Cosmic Character." 



APPENDIX B 

THE COSMIC CHARACTER ^ 

In two earlier articles in this Journal the writer 
worked to grub out the roots of the pragmatic 
tree of knowledge. The tap-root he found to be 
a bare function, an universal activity, in its primal 
nature subpersonal and subconscious. In this 
paper I presume to deal with the apparent dispar- 
ity between this God, as blind, subvegetable, 
metaphysical first cause, and the cosmic character, 
the God alive, upon which religious experience 
seems to depend. 

I 
First of all we must disabuse our minds of the 
notion that the cosmic character is substantial. 
The function in which life, whether human or cos- 
mic, has its primal cause is practically universal 
and eternal ; but only practically. The function 
is so long as life is ; conscious activity {sum cogir 
tans) is indubitable so long as the living doubt 
continues, but no longer. It is theoretically con- 
ceivable that all life, cosmic as well as human, 
should cease to be. In this catastrophic event 
the allegedly everlasting water-springs would have 
run dry, the tap-root of being would wither and 

1 Reprinted from the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology 
and Scientific Methods, Vol. VI., No. 12. 

187 



188 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

dry up into nothing, the world-soul would flicker 
out in black death. 

But there is in all this no occasion for pausing. 
Tested pragmatically, death and nothing are un- 
thinkable concepts. Reflection upon them could 
not further, but only retard life. Their sole real- 
ity consists in their devilish power to defeat at 
every point the lust of rationalism, the senseless 
passion for absolute certainty. Meanwhile I 
find no thinkable connection between this absolute 
certainty and that practical certainty upon which 
active life depends. 

The cosmic function is indeed conceivably per- 
ishable. But its decadence into death and noth- 
ing is practically unthinkable. Just because the 
cosmic life would in such an event flicker out into 
nothing, no one could possibly prepare his person 
for such a catastrophic end. The very last as- 
sumption with which our practical reason can get 
on is that of a functional activity which, as ac- 
tive, is practically absolute and imperishable ; and 
this no matter what disease, human or cometary, 
may assault its universal life. Let one be purely 
humanitarian in his humanism after the manner 
of the positivists. Even so, he must assume that 
energy in one form or another of human activity 
is unassailable. This is the live nub of the school- 
man's insistence upon an eternal as existent. 
There simply must be an aireipov^ he thinks — a 
That in its root impractical, but in its potenti- 



THE COSMIC CHARACTER 189 

alities inexhaustible and practically absolute.^ 
There has got to be an universal energy on 
which the phenomenal life of God and of men may 
draw endlessly. Of course men and God may not 
have this limitless credit in the great vault beyond. 
There is a certain speculative risk in all life, for 
that is the condition of life. Our lives, human 
and cosmic, depend upon taking the cash here and 
now and letting the credit go on so long as it 
will. It could only be after God and we were 
eternally dead and nothing, that the default of 
universal energy could reduce us to destitution 
and starvation; i. e., never so long as we know 
ourselves. 

In action the universal energy does function 
radically. It sloughs off dead parts from the 
cosmic organism and renews its withered mem- 
bers. The cosmic environment here and now is 
all on the side of health and perpetuity for those 
who are fit. And this is the first datum of the 
cosmic character: its inherent ability to preserve 
itself alive, its practical assumption that the 
energy within and without is everlastingly real 
and subject to all the drafts which can possibly 
be made upon it in the interest of life. 

1 Poincar6 says some clever things of this "something'* 
as it stands in theoretical physics. See his "Science and 
Hypothesis," e, g., p. 166. 



190 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 



The implication of this first datum is that the 
cosmic character is an achievement. The univer- 
sal energy must be drawn upon. In itself it is 
in the last degree impersonal, impractical, indif- 
ferent. The etymologists confinn this in their 
account of the verb of being. " To be " in its 
root-meaning is " to stand forth.'* The world- 
energy, I dare say, genuinely is only when it 
stands forth. The root-meaning of life is ex- 
clamatory, assertive, the will-to-power. I am: 
that I am. 

Too often cosmic life has been conceived as an 
energy which must needs function in the form of 
a phenomenal, universal life : its standing forth is 
a necessary function of its eternal being. The 
Eternal thus unconsciously and without effort cre- 
ates and maintains the best possible world: the 
world-soul does not actively draw upon, but is 
poured in upon, hy the universal energy. But 
this postulate of willynilly creative energy goes 
against the grain of human experience. The fact 
Is that the pouring-in process implies a certain 
suction on the part of the living organism. The 
receiving of power from on high or from within 
Implies a will-to-power. The first-class pessimists 
are wanting in this will ; for them there is agony 
In the growing-pains of life's processes. They 
accordingly refuse to suckle themselves at the 
breast of being. They would sink back into the 



THE COSMIC CHARACTER 191 

tireless, senseless That they set out from. It is 
not inherently impossible that one should in the 
end utterly dam the inlets of the universal energy. 

We must remark in this a second datum of the 
cosmic character. The will-to-power implies a 
will-to-impotence. This ingrained feature of the 
human organism must be transcribed into the cos- 
mic life as well. There is an energy circumpress- 
ing both within and without. Upon this the cos- 
mic life draws at all times and places of its even- 
tual life. The drawing-in process is not neces- 
sary, but optional. Merely to be, to stand forth, 
is in itself an unconscious symptom of health and 
character. For the universal life, like the human 
in its morbid moods, may genuinely prefer dissolu- 
tion to further organization, death to life. The 
world-organism is thus an achievement. The tire- 
lessness, persistency, and continuity of its being 
are symptomatic of a certain sanity, a congenital, 
temperamental healthy-mindedness in the living 
soul of things. 

There are cases, individual and racial, of ap- 
parently incurable insanity : the inlets of the uni- 
versal life with its unconscious sanity seem hope- 
lessly dammed up. Such evil is radical. Its 
cure, I imagine, can only be effected, if by any 
means, by a painful, conscious operation within 
the universal life itself. Certainly in its case the 
unconscious remedial agency of the cosmic life 
has miserably failed. But in any event the exist- 
ence here and there of diseased parts in the world- 



192 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

organism does not argue that the whole is incom- 
petent or likely to degenerate into the amorphous 
energy, the cosmic infancy, it set out from. 
The evidence weighs heavily on the side of the 
general sanity of the cosmic life. 

A third datum of the cosmic character there- 
fore, is its animal efficiency and unconscious san- 
ity. It achieves being, it draws upon the uni- 
versal energy by a natural instinct-to-be. 

in 

In these prime data, however, the cosmic char- 
acter is subconscious and subpersonal. So far, 
the cosmic life is strictly animal ; it grows instinc- 
tively in the virgin womb of being. The human 
life is suckled, fortified and sanified within this 
cosmic animal.^ 

This, too, is religion of a certain type and its 
proper emotions are in a profound degree the- 
ophanic. Meanwhile it is arch-pessimism — a 
religion based upon the experience of personal 
life as a disease of consciousness to be remedied 
by anesthesis and analgesis, a return to the sub- 
conscious organism of which personal feeling-will 
is but an inflamed member. Cosmic character, so 
the argument goes, is only weakened and diseased 
by these germs of personality. 

1 One feels secure and willing to function naturally 
within cosmos's great organism. But I wonder if our 
cosmic emotion at this level is not really comparable with 
the gratitude we might feel toward a great animal that has 
instinctively saved our own skin and bones from the grave? 



(( 



THE COSMIC CHARACTER 193 

The writer agrees that a person is an inflamma- 
tion of cosmic being. But this disease of person- 
ality is a condition in which alone such terms as 
purpose," " value," " worth," " morality," gain 
genuine meaning. Religious pessimism has al- 
ways aimed at so-called unconscious purpose, in" 
stinfictive worth, animal morality. But really 
these are all contradictions in terms. They would 
reduce ends to unconscious, instinctive, animal 
functions, whereas the quintessential meaning of 
an end requires that it be consciously felt, aimed 
at, controlled; in a word, that it prepossess and 
be consciously acknowledged by some person. I 
grant that this condition is hard. Each fulfill- 
ment wherein a conscious purpose becomes a part 
of the organism's unconscious character is but 
the progenitor of another newly-felt purpose ; and 
so on endlessly. But this constitutes conscious 
as distinguished from unconscious character. In 
personality there is an indispensable endless chal- 
lenge to unfulfilled being, a " standing forth " 
which, on the one hand, will not permit the human 
life to sink back into the unconscious bliss of 
animal activity it has risen above, and which, on 
the other hand, can never raise that human life to 
a haven of supraconscious rest. Fichte found 
this inner anstoss a challenge for all time. Car- 
lyle leapt under it as under a cosmic lash. Poor 
Nietzsche lost his sanity under the pressure of its 
ceaseless will-to-power. 

At all events the cosmic life has in us taken on 



194 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

a conspicuous personal character. In us its pres- 
ent ends are genuinely felt. In us its ends are 
unthinkable, endless, as the pessimists are everlast- 
ingly reminding us; but they are none-the-less 
conscious imperatives. We may risk disease, lose 
the sanity of our pure reason in gaining the san- 
ity of our practical, but if we turn back we are as 
salt which has lost its savor: we lose the very 
flavor and essence of character. In us, then, the 
blind character of the cosmic impulses has be- 
come endlessly conscious. Henceforth we must 
aim at being, we must control our ends even to the 
point where the abysmal possibilities of being 
blind us with a new kind of blindness ; the blind- 
ness of one whose pupils strain to take in the 
invisible. 

" But this is positivism, pure and simple," some 
one will say. " This is human character, very 
good while it lasts ! but it makes out no such case 
for the universal life. It means merely that a 
certain animal has evolved into conscious self- 
possession. Man, so far, sports above his cosmic 
progenitor. Like positivism, your cosmic hu- 
manism is really an ungoddmg (Entgottung) of 
the universal life, a surreptitious deification of 
human being. Is God, then, merely a ' crowd- 
consciousnes '? '' 

To all this cosmic humanism must reply imper- 
turbably: God, if not merely human, is at any 
rate essentially just that. Our humanism has 
practically all its active interests in common with 



THE COSMIC CHARACTER 195 

scientific positivism.^ In its description of the 
universal life there is no taint of magic religion 
nor of overleaping metaphysics. The world* 
ground as the incomparably fecund matrix of the 
present cosmos is in our view identical with the 
ether-strains of experimental physics. Cosmos is 
a system of countless straining relations, a com- 
plex of Energie-stromen. Psychophysically the 
cosmic character appears, so far, as an organism 
of vital activities risen to the level of animal sub- 
consciousness. In us this cosmic animal has 
varied to the high level of personal consciousness. 
But then, the " eternal " of rationalism is an 
unnecessary hypothesis, if only human character 
be allowed cosmic application and sweep. If con- 
scious aiming is now and practically universal in 
the cosmic hfe, to say that it has been eternally 
so adds nothing significant to the present facts 
and life of the world-soul. The fact is that the 
hypothesis of an eternal, infinite character uncon- 
sciously seeks to remedy the one glaring defect in 
positivism ; namely, its inveterate thinking of man 
apart from cosmos. But the human organism is 
continuous with the unthinkably limpid stuff of 
which the universal life itself is a function. In 
a most important and literal sense the character 
of any part of the world-life is in its degree the 
character of the whole. The universal energy 
which all life draws upon its practically a per- 

1 1 mean " scientific " as distinguished from the more 
passionate but shallower ethical positiyism. 



196 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

feet, limpid fluid. If I tap my desk here with 
my pen the world-ground is moved gelatinously 
throughout its whole being. Now, I permit in 
my person impulses of conscious purpose; these 
aims are like my pen-taps of a moment ago: 
whenever they hit the truth in the bull's-eye, they 
ring their reality into the whole cosmic life; and 
this by physical necessity, if you please. The 
cosmic life in us and through us has become in all 
its physical energies a persona] animal. Should 
it turn back from the endless Person it now aims 
to become, should it seek to reduce or prevent the 
inflammation which in us brings it to conscious 
possession of all its own latent energies, it would 
surely degenerate into the blind, witless being it 
once was. 

An infinite appetite for personal being is thus 
a third datum of the cosmic character. 

rv 

Once we entertain the notion that the cosmic 
life is moved through and through by the birth of 
men within its being there remains only the task 
of ascribing to the cosmic character the ineradi- 
cable forms and passions of the human organism. 
For the religion of humanism will turn out to be 
in the highest degree anthropomorphic and an- 
thropopathic in its experience of the divine life. 

As to the anthropomorphic character of the 
cosmic life. The cosmic physique obviously is 
free from the parts and organs we commonly re- 



THE COSMIC CHARACTER 197 

mark in the frames of animals ; it has no systems, 
circulatory, skeletal, urinogenital, and the like. 
It has not the blue eyes and fair hair of its Thra- 
cian idolator, nor the flat nose of the Ethiopian. 
It is as it were " all eye," " all ear," and " all 
thought." If it be physical at all, it would seem 
to have the quality of sensuous experience without 
the visible end-organs thereof. 

Is, then, the cosmic life completely amorphous? 
This we can hardly say; for there is in fact a 
cosmic physique — planets, stars, earths, comets, 
all more or less harmoniously adjusted by this 
time into a systematic whole. Our thought of the 
cosmic life may thus in one point be psycho- 
physicaly and anthropomorphic. It is of course 
a figure to speak of the universal life as " all 
eye " and " all ear." Regarding its gross anat- 
omy, one would be nearer the literal truth in 
thinking of the cosmic physique as all brain. 
The stellar universe, once more in its gross anat- 
omy, is not unlike the cellular structure of a hu- 
man cerebrum.^ Of all our animal psychophys- 
ical functions it is the cerebral which the cosmic 
life most nearly duplicates. 

It would seem that we can dispense with every 
other form of physique save the nervous. Let 
idealism operate to remove that and the remain- 
ing reality is in the last degree unreal and im- 

1 If a cerebrum were magnified to be proportionate with 
the stellar universe, I imagine the individual neurons 
would present a spectacle not unlike that of the stars and 
planets of the elliptoid universe. 



198 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

practical. Thus the cosmic life like the human, 
may be conceived as indefinitely changing the 
form of its neural physique, constantly refining 
its centers and perhaps generating new (astral) 
nervous systems ad libitum. But the neural gist 
must persist if the life, human or cosmic, is to be 
real and practical in its impulses and ideas. 

Cosmic humanism is thus anthropomorphic in 
its religious intention. In its essential terms it 
gratifies men's ingrained passion for human form 
in the divine life ; i. ^., by establishing in the place 
of the overturned God of hands and feet a real 
community of cerebral experience between man 
and the universal life. The physique of the cos- 
mic life touches the physique of man in his most 
sensitive organ, the brain. Physical functioning 
of the highest order (ideal coordinations, associ- 
ations, intracortical strains, and the like) is the 
same in both. The fourth datum of the cosmic 
life is thus brain-character. 

If now we determine what this cerebral function 
is when void of all the more external organic sen- 
sations and functions of the human frame, we 
shall have some sense of the anthropopathic char- 
acter of the cosmic life. 



The elements left in our conscious processes 
after the elision of all sensory and organic quali- 
ties we are permitted to transcribe into the psycho- 
physical life of the world-soul. We exclude at 



THE COSMIC CHARACTER 199 

once all the base constituents of our human ex- 
perience, all organic and sensory processes. The 
cosmic brain exposes no lobes ; nor is it attached 
sympathetically to the " systems " which enliven 
our human frames. What, then is this pure, cere- 
bral experience? 

1. There is in our human system a certain 
grossness of psychophysical experience. But we 
aim always to submit our muscle and joint strains, 
visceral sensations and all that, to the control of 
our higher, cerebral energies. Now, we may sup- 
pose that this subordination of lower under higher 
centers is furthered and affirmed by the cosmic 
life, for the excellent reason that in the universal 
life the lower centers are not central and indeed 
do not exist: all its energies are physically, prac- 
tically ideal. I dare say, the exquisite energiz- 
ing of the human organism when the cerebral 
function is uppermost is due to the fact that its 
energy is then directly in the stream of the cosmic 
life's cerebral energy. The human brain dupli- 
cates in its measure the physical harmonies of the 
celestial spheres. 

2. Now, if this cosmic life is cerebral, it has 
more in common with the human than either mys- 
tic ecstasy or pessimistic coma has yet dreamed 
of in their philosophies of escape from phenome- 
nal being. There is a dash of insanity in each 
of these extremes : mania in the one instance and 
melancholia with terminal coma in the other. The 
cosmic character, above all, must be well balanced ; 



200 RELIGION AND THE MODERN MIND 

it must not blink the facts of its experience in an 
unbroken, maniacal ecstasy, nor must it wear 
itself out in the currents of being till it seeks relief 
in the unconscious silence in which its articulate 
purposes are set. 

Just here I think, we uncover the supreme 
datum of the cosmic character — its conscious 
sanity. The cosmic life on its conscious side may 
well be assaulted by world-weariness. It is in- 
deed in the highest degree probable that the 
energy-strains of the universal life should become 
fearfully fatiguing. In such an event the plan- 
ets would continue on their unbroken course just 
as our neurons remain in their proper places even 
while wearing themselves out toward weariness and 
unconsciousness. Cosmic health and sanity is an 
achievement, as we have already remarked. To 
balance its world-soul between these extremes of 
endless, senseless, ecstasy, on the one hand and 
endless, vegetative subconsciousness, on the other, 
I conceive to be the supreme achievement of the 
cosmic character. 

These, then, are the congenital feelings in the 
cosmic life: strain and haul, now ecstatic and 
again depressant, but with a practical intelligence 
that maintains the cosmic sanity. 

3. The emotions in particular which character- 
ize this balancing process are in the human case 
the feelings of patience and hopefulness. These 
melioristic feelings lie just between the extremes 
of world-pain and world- joy. In their pure form 



THE COSMIC CHARACTER 201 

they are, we may suppose, non-sensuous, intra- 
cortical. Meanwhile, or perhaps just because 
they are cerebral, they are emotions which simply 
reek with character. They alone, I fancy, are 
the emotions which on second thought our an- 
thropopathic religion would be willing to tran- 
scribe into the cosmic character. On "first 
thought we select unbroken joy as the pathetic 
datum of the divine life. But such a gift, as we 
have seen, cheapens and indeed cancels all the 
other virtues of conscious life. Accepting it 
one's life becomes at once supraconscious and im- 
practical. The desideratum of conscious, practi- 
cal life would be to face eternity hopefully and 
patiently. And now this enduring patience and 
hopefulness are Hteral data of the cosmic charac- 
ter. They are congenital and ineradicable in the 
well-balanced mind. Sanity is indeed just prac^ 
tical intelligence^ buoyancy, rebounding energy 
— in a word patience and hopefulness, the abil- 
ity to await patiently the returning of life's 
energies and buoyant confidence in life's outcome. 
Our postulate of the cosmic sanity involves these 
emotions as its necessary data. 



NOV 4 1900 



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